Chapter Four: SpaceGo to chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 Tuesday, November 19th was a pretty ordinary day for me, up until I got to Alex's place. The only really significant thing was that I got to spend some quality time with Lia and Becky, who are pretty cool people once you get to know them. Since it was a Tuesday, we had our weekly team meeting after school, but Lia had something to do for drama, so we agreed to have the meeting after dinner. The guys all went over to find somewhere to eat, and since Lia doesn't have a car of her own, I stuck around so I could drive her to Alex's. As it turned out, they only needed her for a couple scenes, so the three of us just discussed various things for a while. I got to needle Lia about Rick a bit, but I think she's used to it by now. The two of them make a pretty incongruous couple, but he obviously hangs on her every word but is too awkward to tell her so and she's fine with that whole kind of thing, so it's not my business to interfere. I overheard one of the drama techies muttering, "Heck, Sarah's here more often than Wilbur is, and she's not even in the show," which was funny because it was true. So I made a point of noticing them at that moment; the expression on his face as his buddy said, "Oh, hi, Sarah, how are things going?" was priceless. Becky says I've got a mean streak, but I'm perfectly harmless. Really. I think Lia and I are on pretty good terms, actually. She doesn't look like the kind of person who'd have fun doing anything but studying, but when she's around friends she opens up. It's great for all of us, really, being able to relax and have fun with people who know you're a mutant. You don't feel like you have to hide anything you don't want to hide. Did I mention we decided the shirts were unworkable after we fought the Olympians? Ben was kind of disappointed, but he'll get over it. They weren't exactly the coolest designs ever. Instead, Alex found us all little things we could take on or off while remaining unobtrusive. I've got my hair ties, Alex has a ring, Rick got a pin for his trenchcoat, Timothy got our logo embroidered on a polo shirt. Fits our personalities a lot better, as our group really isn't the uniform type. That doesn't mean we don't stick together, though. We still meet Tuesdays after school at Alex's place. When his parents are there, we usually just hide out downstairs and goof off while somebody searches the net for anything we could do, see if we can find any more mutants with maybe some more experience who we could get in touch with. Timothy says he's working on controlling their minds so they won't notice and we can practice even around them, but I don't think he's quite ready for that yet. It's all bluster, at least I hope so. I don't know why he calls himself Timothy, though. He seems to me to be the kind of person who'd want to go by Tim: easygoing, good-looking, charitable, not a science whiz but a nice guy all around. I suspect it's because he wants to keep some distance from the rest of us. He's afraid of what he can do. A lot like Lia, actually, except that she doesn't always have her power on. At least she's not flashing all the time, which is good for our sanity as well as hers. I kind of feel sorry for them, not having the option to forget that they're mutants and enjoy life as normal for a while. Timothy asked me out three weeks ago, by the way. Naturally I said yes: I didn't have anyone at the moment, and it's hard to find someone whose company for a casual date you will enjoy more than his, for obvious reasons. Bear with me, this will be on topic eventually. Over dinner, he explained that there were exactly two girls who knew about his powers, and one of them was, well, Lia. I can see why he wouldn't want to open that can of worms: Lia has her own problems, about three of which are named Rick. I'm not a big fan of his, we're like completely opposite on everything that matters. But back to the subject at hand. Apparently he felt he could trust me, which is good to know especially considering the source, and so he wanted to talk to me, with his power off. He'd been working on it, he said. Go ahead, I said. He nodded and started looking at me intently. It was kind of weird. You know the old adage that you don't know how much you miss something until you're deprived of it? That was definitely the case here. It was as if someone had been holding a lightbulb behind him all the time, and they just dimmed it slowly to zero. In about ten seconds, he was in the harsh light of normal humanity. I started noticing his five-o'clock shadow, the annoying way that he rubbed his nose when he was nervous, the dispassionate way he was examining me as if I were a fly under his microscope. The same expression he uses for almost anyone female, I realized. Suddenly the amazing Timothy had faults, but I kept my face carefully controlled, because I realized with a shock that he was still a nice guy. In lit class, I was reading about Dorian Gray, who was perfect on the outside but unspeakably evil on the inside, and only this one picture of him reflected what he was like on the inside. It was like finding Timothy's picture, and discovering it wasn't any more hideous than the rest of us. Sure, there were a couple warts here and there, but no blood of the innocent like I expected. "I see," I answered carefully. "How well do you think this is working?" Timothy was understandably a bit frustrated at me. "How am I supposed to know?" he demanded. "You tell me, how does Dorian Gray look now that the spell is lifted?" I let out a little gasp, and was glad to see him smile a little. I realized my mistake the next second: he couldn't read my mind, I had just forgotten that we were in the same lit class. So I put up a hand to forestall him and said, "It's working quite well, thank you. You know, you're not such a bad guy, even without the powers. They must have kept you honest, I suppose." "It's my parents' achievement, really. I thought they couldn't refuse me anything, but when it came down to it, they found a way around it. I really didn't want to go get in trouble, and so they never had to tell me I couldn't. Smarter than he looks, my dad is." "Most parents are." And with that, we had started a real conversation, among equals. Timothy turned out to be surprisingly insecure on the inside: he knew people liked him because of his powers, and he'd kept that knowledge hidden in a little corner of his mind for a long time. Ben forced him to admit to it that night in Rick's van, and ever since then he'd had that question of how much was him being a good person and how much was only his manipulation gnawing inside him. I kept having to reassure him that he hadn't done anything wrong more than the rest of us have, he just didn't get in trouble with anyone else for it like we do. We've got a serious relationship going now, to cut a long story short, based on the fact that I'm basically the only person he can talk to who doesn't stand in awe of him all the time. Although I wouldn't be quite so cold-blooded about it, Timothy points out that my new standing among the rest of the girls has helped me tell which ones are my friends and which ones just want to use me to get to him. I didn't tell him that the real situation was a little bit more complicated; I think he knows more than enough about me already. So I've been helping him get a little more used to being an amateur empath. He's quite clear on that point, actually: he doesn't have magical mental powers, all he can do is read and influence your emotions. It's a bit difficult to wrap your mind around the idea that he's got to learn how to use and refine his powers just like the rest of us do: he can make you feel angry or depressed, sure, but it takes a lot more than that to defend yourself against another mutant. If you're on the soccer team, there's a place for drills and a place for real games, and it's the same for us. We spend a lot of time just learning how to control and extend our abilities, and when we have the chance we spar a little, mostly against Alex - Reality, I should say - because he can take a lot of punishment. (More punishment than the rest of us can dish out, Mind would add.) Alex continues to fascinate me. All I really knew about him before forming the team was what I heard from my friends, that he was always pulling pranks of some kind or another, always a troublemaker who did everything he could to annoy the teacher but was a pretty decent student otherwise. When he's Reality, self-appointed team leader, it's almost like he's a different person. I don't need an empath to tell me that he's always concerned about the rest of the team; somehow he sees us as his responsibility when we're in his house and under his direction. He's strong-willed, covers up his sense of humor, and demanding of both the rest of us and himself. I wonder if that's just because he imagines that's what a good leader is like, or if the use of his powers somehow changes his outlook on life? There's certainly no love lost between him and Rick, they're always acting like twelve-year-olds over anything they can find to make into an argument. And yet when it matters, Rick is always doing what he should be doing, and at school, they're solid friends. I just don't get it, but I suppose I don't have to get it, I just have to work with it. * * * * Now that I've covered some of the context from a personality standpoint, here's the situation from a superhero team standpoint. At one of our Tuesday night meetings, a bit after it ended, we were all doing some general relaxing and hanging out when Lia called Rick over to Alex's computer, where she'd been checking her email. She thought it was spam, but he quickly verified that it was real. The message was short, inviting her to join an IRC channel, #topten on hsa.gov, tonight at her convenience, and giving the requisite passwords. It could have been just a con, except that the mail actually had come from mailinglist@mad.hsa.gov, which traced back to the website of the US Government's Homeland Security Agency, Mutant Activities Division. The HSA was infamous in mutant circles, at least the ones we'd found, always trying to catch any mutants they could get their hands on like the cops are always after the mob in those Mafia movies. Being a mutant isn't technically illegal, but using our powers is considered assault with a deadly weapon under federal law, which is a price tag nobody's willing to pay. So we were all worried that the HSA had gotten wind of us after our battle with the Olympians. Ben tried to console us by saying that if they knew all of our identities, they'd have come straight here, and the email was probably just to convince Lia to give the rest of us up. Of course, that didn't really comfort anybody except Ben, but we let him say it anyway. That's just how he is. We all gathered around the computer and watched over Lia's shoulder as she logged on. Ben was positively itching to get his fingers on the keyboard, but Lia wisely didn't let him. As it turned out, the HSA had no interest in mild-mannered everyday Lia Chin. They wanted Soul. Instead of copying-and-pasting the IRC chat logs, I'll give you a short summary and some of my impressions. The channel #topten gets its name from the fact that it's supposed to be a chat room for the ten most powerful mutants in America. One of the ten had recently "left the list" (a term we shortly figured out was a euphemism for "died"), and Soul was one of the five top candidates for his replacement, so she was allowed on the channel not only so that she would be introduced to some of her peers, but so that the HSA's top telepath could find her and read her mind to see how powerful she really was, in order for the final decision to be made. When the telepathy bit was mentioned, Timothy got predictably excited. He wanted to find out anything he could about how he could defend himself against people like Venus, and there was probably some insecurity about the breadth of his own abilities mixed in there as well. Lia asked a couple casual questions, and lo and behold! The man himself showed up. He introduced himself as Matthew Alnora, employed by the HSA as a "mutation research engineer". He added as an afterthought, "I also happen to be the most powerful telepath on planet Earth." We'd seen something like that coming, since his username was NumberTwo. Soul suddenly flashed a little, not as bright as usual but definitely noticeable, and NumberOne logged on at that moment. Seeing the situation, he gleefully shared with us what Alnora was leaving out: he'd become the most powerful telepath by systematically killing all his opposition fifteen years ago, back when he was working in the Department of Defense, to prevent any of them from defecting to the Communists. That was our first warning that we were playing in the big leagues. In fact, six of the top 10 were either in prison or wanted by the FBI: not a particularly surprising picture, considering that power corrupts, but still quite a grim one. NumberOne himself was a very interesting online personality as well. He introduced himself as "Mars, god of war", for starters. He was arrogant, sarcastic, always cracking jokes, always telling us things that the rest didn't want to tell, seemingly unaware that he was doing anything wrong. When Alnora prodded him, he was even willing to recount fun details about his own life and powers. This also had the side effect of cutting short the many questions Lia had, like how he could possibly be more powerful than a telepath with a government carte blanche behind him. The way he explained it was all perfectly reasonable. He had become aware of his powers at a very young age, like the rest of us, and one day in his mid-twenties he woke up and decided he never wanted to grow older ever again. In his own words, "So I did. This was in 1845." Every day he gets up and erases all traces of the past day's aging from him. Sometimes, when he pulls an all-nighter, he forgets, and he's not sure how much he could control going backward in age without losing his memories, so he estimates his age at around 30 here in 2002. This guy had the Fountain of Youth working for him, and he just brushed it off like it wasn't important. It really wasn't important, in context. You see, Mars can alter reality as he chooses. Anything he can sense (which is anything less than a few hundred yards away, an excellent range honed by centuries of practice), he can change, by pumping energy in or out at the subatomic level. He's practically invulnerable, because every time he gets hurt, he simply restores himself back to his condition before it happened, as an instinctive reaction. The only people who could possibly touch him were Numbers Two and Three: Alnora, who apparently had a truce going with him, and the recently deceased James Sazuki, whose shoes Soul was attempting to fill. Of course, she'd come in as number ten, not number three, but that's only to be expected. I didn't think she was anywhere near in the same league as these guys, but I suppose being lucky can come in extremely handy if you can make it happen all the time. The most interesting bit I haven't related yet was Lia's reaction. She'd always felt a little depressed, as if she wasn't holding up her end of the bargain for the team, since she didn't have anything she could do other than stand around and hope her power triggered to help us out. Being told she was one of the top fifteen people being watched by the United States Government for extremely dangerous power levels was too much for her. She just couldn't believe it. We all stayed back, except for Rick: much as I wanted to help her, we'd all fought this battle ourselves at some point or another, trying to deny how different we were and what that meant we had to do. As the Bible says, "To whom much is given, much shall be required." Or at least I think that's the right quote. She shoved Rick away and turned back inside herself, going on the Internet to escape the rest of us. Timothy gave us some significant glances and the five of us retreated upstairs to think things over. Ben, as always, looked at the stuff nobody else would bother to mention. He wanted to know if the HSA would break up the team. Alex responded grimly, "They'll have to catch us first." I can't think of a more telling measure of how much we trusted him and each other than the fact that there were no complaints about that. We'd rather do what we could as a team than live our lives in obscurity alone. I don't know how the rest of them thought it through, but as for me, I'd already had a taste of the intoxicating wine of helping others. Volunteer service had nothing on this, the chance to save people's lives while finally using my God-given resources to do a job only I could do. Ben was extremely tense, fidgeting. Timothy asked him what was wrong. It pained him to admit it, but we finally squeezed out that he didn't know what would happen. "Something bad," he said. "Something very dangerous. That's all." It was then when a black, shiny new SUV pulled into Alex's driveway. We looked out the window, but didn't recognize the license plates, and no one stepped out of the car. I remember hearing footsteps on the stairs, I assume from context they must have been Lia coming to warn us, but I didn't know what they were at the time. And then my mind was not my own. You know how when some people get drunk, they act like a completely different person? They forget everything they knew, have all their restraints removed, and act totally on whatever instinct the alcohol brings out in them. Being possessed by Mizuno (that was his name, or rather I thought of it as my name) was a little like that, except that I wasn't out of control, I was working according to a precise plan. It was simply his plan, not mine. I felt his probing thoughts, boring deeper into my subconscious and my memories, trying to figure out what to do. I was on my knees, my vision clouded in a haze of pain, and then I shook it off and stood up, a terrible smile on my face. "Sarah?" asked Timothy, suddenly afraid. "What's wrong?" Ben took a look outside at the van, looked back at me, and his eyes narrowed. "She's being mind-controlled. Watch out!" he snapped as he darted for the glasses in his pocket. The rest of the team backed away, still too confused to do anything. I saw my eyes follow Time's hand to his pocket, remembered what those glasses meant for his fighting ability, felt myself opening a gateway above me and dropping my staff into my hand. I made a thrust, caught him square in the chest, bowled him over and his chair with him. Mizuno inside me was thrilled at my ability to handle the staff, and spent a few seconds twirling it just to show off, an evil grin still on my face. Reality took command, the presence of a threat bringing him into leadership mode. His voice was deeper, more powerful. Scared, I think, or at least Mizuno thought so. "Everyone outside!" The rest of the team had one thing going for them: Mizuno didn't have access to my thoughts, or even most of my memories, without taking extra time he didn't have. So when Soul pulled open the door and it slammed me into the wall, he assumed she was telekinetic or extraordinarily strong or something. With the extra time that bought us, the team was ready in R's backyard (the front door was already to the side of the house, so Mizuno was easily led out of the way of prying eyes) by the time I caught up to them. Mizuno tried to open a gateway, but couldn't; my hand and brain jabbed futilely at the empty air. In retrospect, it was a simple mistake: he'd forgotten that I can't open two gateways, and I already had one open in portable form inside my locket. Irritated, I snapped the locket off its chain and got my powers working. Mizuno played around with the gateway a bit: moving it around, making it bigger, wrapping it in a tube around the trunk of a nearby tree. The last of those was another very strange sensation, as I didn't know I was able to bend it at all. It's like discovering you suddenly had a tail: you've never used your tail muscles before, but it takes hardly any mental effort to do so. I brought the gateway back and rummaged around in it a little, bringing one particular item to the front so I could release it at a moment's notice. Everyone else watched in horrified fascination, although Time was absent. Too bad, he'd undoubtedly want to take notes on "my" discovery, I thought with the back of my mind, on a level Mizuno hadn't bothered to take control over. With no warning I compressed the gateway into a six-inch sphere and threw it like a Frisbee directly at the rest of the team. "Watch out!" cried Soul, who knew just how deadly my projectile was: since it couldn't accommodate an entire person, it would simply tear a perfect circle through their chest, and since my mind was behind it, it could be deflected in any direction to ensure it didn't miss. Reality, showing his usual reluctance to back down, dodged out of its way at the last second, while everyone else backed off a bit to give him room to maneuver. Mizuno had caught us all totally by surprise, except for me of course, and I wasn't exactly helping the team at the time. Instead of following Reality (who could move much faster in the proper shape) and leaving me open to attack, the sphere exploded in shards of glass and metal. Pieces of the computers Annihilator had blown up and my gateway taken in, actually, now expelled with the same momentum they had coming in, which was quite a lot. Alex took the brunt of the blast, his face and torso bleeding in a dozen places, but the rest of the team took their fair share of cuts on arms and shoulders from covering their heads insinctively. The gateway now swerved downwards to follow Reality, as I twirled my staff, laughing in pure delight at the chaos I was causing. Pain exploded into the back of my head. My right arm went limp, I dropped the staff, and a quick kick to the back of the knees sent me sprawling. Time had snuck around behind me, put his glasses on, and was delivering a precision beating with reflexes my staff skills had always had trouble against, even when I didn't have to deal with possession by an evil mutant. All the thoughts left my head in a rush with that realization, and I blacked out for a few seconds. When I came to, I heard Time scream the way I must have been screaming a minute earlier, a scream that quickly stopped as Mizuno took hold of him instead. Mind ran up to me, broadcasting his fear and concern to me as he approached: in the excitement, he must have forgotten to hold back his powers from their usual wide area of effect. "Are you all right?" he asked as he gathered me up in his arms. I didn't bother to answer. I always hated that question: if you need to ask, of course I'm not all right. Instead, I answered with something useful for a change. "Time's been possessed. Knock him out!" Timothy glanced over my shoulder to Time, and opened his mouth to speak, but seeing his services needed elsewhere, laid me down gently and got up just in time to catch Time, who had already been discarded. By quick thinking on Time's part, he still had his glasses on when he was possessed. Unable to interpret the torrent of information coming from his enhanced brain, Mizuno left him for someone more inviting. The next one up was Power. I knew the look in Power's eyes, the same look that I had been on the other end of just a moment ago. After my attempt to get back on my feet was countermanded by superior orders from my splitting headache, I decided to use my staff to help myself up. While doing so, I saw the next battle transpire. Alex had had quite enough of going on the defensive, and he certainly wouldn't regret causing Rick to spend the night in the hospital "in the line of duty", so he showed us he meant business. We'd only seen it a couple times before, in practice, but it was still extremely impressive. As Reality swung his fist, a long sword grew from his arm, his muscles expanding to deal with the increased weight. Unable to dodge, Mizuno panicked. He drew deep into Power's subconscious, looking for anything he could latch on to. He quickly found it, the same weapon that had protected him from Annihilator's preliminary blasts, the Rave Storm or something, I forget the name. It was like a column of shimmering blue-white energy around him. The sword vaporized at its touch. Even if I had been able to help, this fight was Reality's alone. There was nothing I could even think of doing that wouldn't either kill both of them outright or simply annoy them. So I watched in amazement, Mind and Soul watching anxiously at my side, as the sword reformed into a giant, vicious-looking spike and his body flowed upward to become long and thin. He jabbed downward from above the column, and Soul winced and looked away in anticipation. I grabbed her hand and was not surprised to feel Mind's hand on my shoulder turn into a clawlike grip as he felt the force of her emotion and that of the two combatants. Another bright white flash, right beside me, heralded the development of something new. The metal spike too dissolved, hissing and crackling as it melted into liquid, then flash-heated into gas, disappearing into thin air right above Power's head. He looked like he was on fire. "What is he doing to himself?" asked Time, horrified, as he got up. I was wondering much the same thing. He put the glasses back on for a closer look and was vastly relieved to tell us that it somehow wasn't affecting him or his clothes: he'd created a tight energy field around him, one powerful enough to destroy anything it touched almost instantly. "It's taking all his concentration to keep his shield going," reported Time. He yelled to Reality: "Back off! Make him lower the shield!" In less than two seconds, Reality was back in human form some distance away from Power, flowing smoothly into his normal shape (without the damage from my "grenade", of course). The shield winked out just as Time had predicted, as Power sent a line of flame burning across the ground, jumped into the air, and blasted himself over our heads like some kind of human rocket. Instead of attacking from above, however, he swerved and crashed into the side of the house. Time started moving the exact fraction of a second this course of action had become apparent and threw himself at Reality with a wild yell. Still worked up from the battle, Reality became a large birdlike animal and jumped upwards, catching Time and bringing them both to the ground with a crash. That turned out to have been a stroke of genius on both their parts. Mizuno, showing the same logic he had before, had abandoned Power for Reality - apparently trying to work his way up the power chain. Unfortunately, Mizuno was only used to working with human brains, not a creature who wasn't even remotely human. Reality twitched a little on the ground as his mind was invaded and gave out a croaking sound, but didn't change to human form, and the enemy left him for easier prey as he had Time. Another stroke of good luck occurred. Actually, there was a flash from Soul, so I don't know how much real luck was involved, but that's immaterial. Mind, the obvious next target, had also hit upon a way to defend himself. As he told me later, he linked his mind as fully as he could with Time's, letting the extra information wash over him, filling his mental capacity to the brim and beyond. I had been telling him he didn't know his own strength, but this proved it. What I know is that their heartbeats and breathing synchronized, their faces took on the exact same dazed and painful expression, they both tore their glasses off even though Mind had contacts and was simply grasping empty air. They both staggered under Mizuno's attack, clutching their heads in the same way, and then it was over, and they fell over together, Mind knocked unconscious by the physical and mental effort and Time dragged down with him by the last vestiges of their mental link. Only Power and I were available to look at what happened next, since Reality was currently hiding from Mizuno as a field of petunias. Our gazes turned to Soul, and we were both on our feet and heading towards her when Mizuno finished taking control of her mind. Instead of looking at us, however, she was distracted. She didn't even notice our presence, and with a gasp of pain, spread her arms open wide. All hell broke loose within a ten-meter radius of the girl. The grass under our feet caught fire. A passing bird shot straight up into the air faster than it could have dived down at us, doing a miniature barrel roll. Lightning leapt from Power's fingers and looped back into himself, electrocuting him in clear defiance of what I'd learned in physics class. Mind tripped over a shoelace and fell in such a way as to retie the thing as he hit the grass, now frozen solid. My staff slipped out of my hand and hit Power in the face; his lightning bolts turned to beams of laser light shining out from him as he was hit, burning holes in leaves and house alike as the rest of us dodged them. I felt a wave of exhaustion greater than anything I'd ever known come upon me, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, there was a black SUV wrapped around the telephone pole two houses down from Alex's place. Reality's doing, as he explained to us. Apparently, the sleep effect was triggered by Soul in Mind's brain, and affected everyone human in the vicinity. Reality, not having a brain per se at the time, had simply guessed when the battle would be over, transformed back into his human self, and dragged us back inside for some rest. There was an IM waiting for Lia downstairs, from Mizuno, informing us that he no longer wished to do battle with so powerful a group of superheroes. I didn't think we'd been the victors, but apparently he thought otherwise. Lia just looked down and covered her face in her hands. She was crying. I wanted to help, but Timothy was already there with the kind of comfort only he could provide. This was one emotional roller coaster I didn't want to interfere with. And that's the story. I'd learned more from one attack than my weeks of training, and the team would never be the same. That night I asked God to help Lia handle what had happened. She sure could use some divine intervention about now, I thought. * * * * LiveJournal user twalker1229 [Timothy] wrote on 2002-11-30: Teenage angst time. Excuse my rambling, but I need to get this off my chest. I feel really bad about lying to my teammates, Sarah in particular. She doesn't deserve to be treated like this. I think I'll tell her the truth the next time I can get her alone for a few minutes. I'd been meaning to ask her about that lit assignment anyway. I told Sarah and the others that I managed to prevent Mizuno, or whatever his real name is, from attacking me by linking my mind with Time's, and he just couldn't handle all the information. That wasn't precisely true. Scratch that, it's not true at all. I can't think nowhere near that fast, especially when I'm shaken up with no visible target. Mizuno, well, possessed me the same way he did everyone else. Only I'm a mentalist, and so is he. There was no hesitation to learn what my powers were, no time lag between him gaining ascendancy over most parts of me and him using me like a well-tuned instrument. It was Mizuno that decided to link with Time. I think he was under the impression that when we linked up, he would be able to control Time and have the benefit of what he assumed was his super speed without the unintelligible brain, as well as keeping me from interfering. Not that I could interfere, of course. People overestimate me all the time, I'm used to it. He had some way of keeping his mental guard up that prevented me from using my standard methods of control when he was taking over someone else, and those five seconds he spent in control of my empathic ability taught me more than a week of self-taught experimentation with Sarah and Ben. It feels strange to have all my villains for teachers. But I guess it makes sense, when you look at it the right way: if there are other good empaths out there, they certainly wouldn't come knocking on my door, so I have to take what I get. I'm a lot more sure of what I can do now. For instance, I think I've got the whole limiting emotional effects to one specific person thing down, which was a real problem back when I couldn't turn it on or off. Now I might actually be of some use to the team. Wouldn't that be a surprise! If Ben was here, he would say that I've been great use to everyone simply because they all overestimate me. I never liked being the one everyone looks to, and it usually gets me attacked all the time because anybody would be scared of a real mentalist. Not like me, of course. I'm a rank amateur. I'm just doing what I can, trying to do better but not sure I'm doing enough to make a difference. Hey, at least Sarah likes me. It's good to have someone to talk to, and she *is* pretty hot. My parents would like her, I think. I wouldn't get far without her these days, I've got so much on my mind. Kind of ironic, isn't it? The mental wonder boy is overwhelmed by too many thoughts. That's just the way things go sometimes. |