ELF.5
Shujin
M. NightShujinlan
- Location
- New York, New York
E.L.F
The door finished closing behind me with a tiny click and the majority of all the little sounds I'd gotten used to with my improved hearing muffled into a dull drone. Soundproofing, and good soundproofing at that which was an interesting choice for a conference room on the second floor of the Parahuman Response Team building. Everyone knew the PRT was part of the federal government's Alphabet Soup in the same vein as the NSA, FBI, CIA. Their PR machine on the other hand made them cops with magical nerf guns.
They had a protocol for agents compromised by parahuman powers. Considering the various forms of thinking or sensing powers, including seeing into the future, I shouldn't be surprised that the PRT had classified information. If 'Need to know' had an interior design, I was looking at it. And yet, I was the one standing here and not Director Emily Piggot.
I sat down in a chair I could see the door from and mimicked the Chief Director's posture. I clutched my hands maybe a little too hard. The line between 'feeling strongly' and 'overwhelmed' was far too thin for my taste and I was anxious. About what The Chief Director had decided about me, about what she wanted to talk to me for, about everything.
"What do you know about Thinker powers?" Costa-Brown started with. Aside from the obvious 'powers that deal with thinking,' I couldn't say I knew much at all. I browsed the Parahumans Online forums once in a while, but no real research.
What was the point? Getting powers, becoming a hero; those were the kind of pipe dreams that it didn't matter how hard you tried, it was out of your reach. Like being an astronaut. You couldn't earn powers.
"Define 'thinker.'"
"That is the classification for any and all powers that allow the parahuman to obtain information or skills with greater accuracy, speed, range and or breadth than the unassisted human norm." Costa-Brown then smiled with a wry quirk of her lips. "Legal definition. We have to be thorough."
"Like the Library of Alexandria." Rebecca Costa-Brown's face froze. "Eidetic memory, can think faster and, something about expressions?" Hadn't I read that somewhere? My head dipped contritely. "Sorry, I don't know really know my heroes, but Alexandria's been my favorite since I was little."
Legend was 'Pew Pew Lasers' in a costume and Eidolon's power was 'Yes.' Brockton Bay didn't have any Thinker heroes, so I named the only one I knew that fit.
Her eyes made a slight movement to the side of the screen and then back. "Exactly. The PRT rates parahuman powers on a threat scale of one to twelve, although very few parahumans reach ten or above." I frowned at the words 'threat scale' and she picked up on it. "The criteria rubric was first created as policy for the PRT in parahuman confrontations, nothing more. I wish every parahuman was at least law abiding." Truth. "But that is not always the case."
"One is?"
"Slightly more capable than the average human."
"And twelve?"
Now it was Costa-Brown's turn to frown. "Beyond the PRT's paygrade."
Wait a minute. "Even Thinkers?" I stressed. I really couldn't see how having a really good memory or being able to tell what people were feeling as being that dangerous.
"Yes," she said, deadly serious.
Oh, ouch.
"An ability to obtain sensitive information from someone roughly twenty-eight hundred miles away through a phone call is a concern, to put it lightly."
I winced. Hearing it put like that gave me a new, anxious appreciation for the 'government branch' part of the PRT. "I'm sorry, it's just, the PRT is important and – "
"You didn't like the idea of it not being what it seemed." She cut off what was threatening to be a babble. "I understand, however purposely attempting to reveal said sensitive information will have severe consequences. Understood?"
A prickle went down my spine and I reflexively glanced towards the door.
I didn't even understand the sensitive information. Nothing about it seemed relevant to the PRT in anyway but at the same time I couldn't shake the feeling that it must be. I saw what I saw but I didn't have context for it yet. What is the purpose of the PRT? The temptation to just pull more information out curled in my head with an unfamiliar twisting heat. I kept my eyes locked on hers and sifted through the ripples pressing deep into my head.
She was farther.
"Could have had Director Piggot tell me that," I observed to mask my surprise. I didn't think my power even recognized distance but I could definitely feel it now. It wasn't in a lateral direction but more, underneath? Like the ripples of her presence were emanating from another layer, one that was extremely thin. Where was she? Maybe here to California was a soft limit on my range? "Why do you want to talk to me?"
"Because unless it's absolutely necessary, security breaches are not solved by bringing others in."
She unclasped her hands, bringing one up to rest her chin on. Costa-Brown wore small square bifocal glasses and a crisp navy blue suit with golden buttons. It was the look of someone comfortable in a boardroom or on a hearing floor, but I could feel a small shiver of unease from her.
"If you would describe what you saw in detail?"
Recalling the, vision I guess would be the word for it, was easy. "A woman giving vials to people."
"Describe her," Costa-Brown cut in.
"Dark skin, long black hair and wears business casual." I searched through the memory. "Prefers to wear light colors, white, blue, yellow, sometimes with a white lab coat and clipboard."
"The vials?"
"The vials have labels. Not on them physically, but I just," I pulled my hands apart and laid them flat on the table just behind the keypad of the imbedded terminal. Between my fingers ran the dark waxy lines of the wood grain.
"I just know." I'm not interrupted this time. "I see a person receive one and drink, sometimes after signing papers, other times after just talking, and then I see the next person. The vision has…threads," I involuntarily grimace at that description. Paths would have been better. "I think I can follow them."
"Don't."
There was a bit of an intent to conceal there. It was not actively malicious, I thought, but that could always change. There were things she didn't want me to know, but she was attempting to be honest. Within limits.
"Don't ask questions, get no lies?" I made sure to pitch my voice soft and non-threatening. Rebecca Costa-Brown was playing gatekeeper. Find out what I know, then silence me. I had a…feeling she had more options for silence than making me sign a Nondisclosure Agreement. There was a reason she wasn't using it. Something about my powers?
"Classified?"
The Chief Director smiled but it didn't reach her eyes. "The important question here is what to do with you?" Her gaze shifted the tiniest bit to the side again, and I caught a strange reflection off one of her eyes, like the light hadn't hit it right. "As much as it is a concern, thinker powers are a strategic asset. If you are willing, I want to test your limitations."
I barely needed my powers to read into that. She wanted to know if there was a way around my powers. If I was in her shoes, I'd be wondering that too but, between blowing up the bathroom and now, I hadn't gotten any more eloquent in describing how my powers work so this was going to be interesting.
"I'm…just figuring this out as I go along. I have no idea what I can do, until I do it."
"From my understanding, most parahumans have at least, a vague awareness of their powers if not the details."
It took being slapped with Dad's emotional clue-by-four to even notice I had a passive power. "Guess I'm not most parahumans."
"Hm," was the only verbal response she gave to that. I could feel a glimmer of curiosity though. "Did terminating the call abort your vision?"
I shook my head. "The sound did. I got distracted and lost sight of the ripples you made."
"Ripples?"
I paused a moment to put the words together in a way that didn't make me sound like an idiot. "My power seems to based off an extra sense. You know the concept of positive versus negative space?" She nodded. "Imagine everything physical is positive space. Even the air. But then, between, is negative space. I can feel people interacting with that space, making ripples. When I touch those ripples, I get a sense of what you feel."
"Can you feel me now?"
"Yes. I didn't feel any kind of distance before but, you are a bit farther now, I think."
Costa-Brown's lips pursed with a little irritation. "And this is how you perceive someone lying?"
"I didn't say lying, did I?" I asked, lifting my eyes from the table to look at her straight on. "I said not true."
A few seconds passed with neither of us saying anything. "I could feel you," I continued softly. "There were many minor falsehoods in your words and you were dripping with intent to deceive." That twisting heat in my head was back. I kept it contained this time. A repeat performance now was really not a good idea. "I do not care about the rest. Hyperbole, a little twisting of the facts," I shrugged and dropped my eyes. "Everyone does that."
The quiet that followed wasn't awkward, but tense. This was a tipping point. I could almost feel a strand stretch between us, close to snapping. She was either going to cut me off here, or reveal just a bit more of what was behind the curtain. I clenched my hands into small fists on the table and kept my eyes down, tracing the grains. I let the heat in my head curl out, just a little. Enough to bleed into the shifting currents around me. I wanted to know.
"The Parahuman Response Team," she began slowly and I snapped my eyes up. "It's part of an eight step plan to integrate parahumans into society."
Truth, but the intent to conceal was still there. That made me relax, slightly. She probably came to the decision on her own, then, since she didn't make a complete one eighty and feel like blurting everything out. I hadn't really done anything, right?
"We haven't reached the end stages of the plan." I hazarded a guess.
"We've stalled at step five." She admitted easily. "What do you know of the Endbringers?"
"Behemoth. Leviathan. The Simurgh."
Three horrific creatures that attacked roughly every three months and nearly every time, they left behind a destroyed city. Behemoth was known for its abilities over energy, heat, electricity, radiation and the one with the most parahuman deaths to its name. Leviathan was a classic sea monster, attacking coastlines and islands with control over water. The Simurgh deserved 'The' in front of its name. It looked like an angel. It caused the least amount of property damage. It didn't even kill that often.
But if it descended on a city, that city was effectively gone. Simurgh victims were time bombs. A newspaper boy one day could get the urge to build a homemade bomb vest and head to the nearest subway station. Multiply that by every person in the city. Who's rigged to blow? No way of knowing.
Closest thing to an answer we had was to lock up the city, and throw away the key.
"I know what everyone knows. Anything in particular?"
"Five days ago, precognition around the world started experiencing, glitches, for lack of a better word." She continued over the sound of the bottom of my stomach dropping out. "We didn't realize they were glitches at first. Most thinker powers are target specific and relatively short range. Powers that don't have a distance limit are rare. Range and coherency are rarer. Target specific powers were mostly unaffected. Those who were included the majority of our WEDGDG division." She waved off the unspoken question. "I will cover that later."
She reached towards the touch screen on her desk and her face was replaced by a high altitude image of an angel with six wings, looking down at the world below.
"This image was taken approximately four hours after the Brockton Bay storm began."
It was an almost artistic picture. I could see a blue expanse partially covered in wispy white clouds in the background. The curvature of the Earth was rimmed with the silver of reflected sunlight and the white angel with six wings hung motionless, looking at something just beyond the picture frame.
"The Simurgh, like the rest of the Endbringers, are difficult to predict, but – "
My heart lurched in my chest. "I can feel her."
I could feel her. If my father was a shadow of a shadow, then the Endbringer was deep, dark hole. She was the source of hundreds of small waves in the ocean that bent, curved and twisted around the currents and ripples of others. Threads of influenced touched thousands more creating a tangled, impossible weave that revealed more connections the more I looked. I was afraid to tug on anything around, half-convinced she'd be able to feel it, feel me.
Rebecca Costa-Brown's emotions spiked, hard, and full of everything. The picture on the screen instantly changed to one closer to Earth. A man of gold in a stained spandex suit and cape hovered above a forest being consumed by a wildfire, distracted, with his head turned.
Scion.
He was far, muted. I willed myself to look for him, the strongest man in the world and the first parahuman, in the shifting space. I had to reach a little, maybe he was on the other side of the world? But once I spotted him, I was able to feel what he was feeling. And what he was feeling nearly bowled me over.
Crushed.
He was grieving. So intensely my eyes welled up with sympathetic tears as I felt an echo of his pain. He was purposeless, without direction and just moving to be moving. A pit of apathy lay just underneath it; as if the world itself was pointless and insignificant. I tugged, gently, just to see if there was a way to help him or at least see what he was grieving for.
I saw an expanse of stars, and two large creatures slowly traversing it. They started to bleed pieces of themselves, shedding. I got a feeling that chilled me down to the very bone.
Dangerous.
"Yes, he is." Costa-Brown startled me out of the vision and I was suddenly aware that I had been staring at the eastern wall of the conference room, trembling. I've been talking out loud? The Chief Director's face was back on the screen. She held her glasses in one hand as she gazed intently at me.
Her eyes were different, I realized. Only the left one was real. "I am putting in a recommendation to test your ability to contribute to the PRT's Watchdog think tank. You're a minor, but I'm sure I can work something out with Emily." Wait, what? " You and your father will have to sign NDAs, but the local PRT can handle the necessary details. Do you mind if I ask you one last question?"
I blinked slowly, feeling wrung out and tired. "Depends."
"I borrowed a colleague's office. Know anything about it?"
I knew what she was asking.
So I pulled, gently, trying to focus on just the information I wanted. All I got was an image of a perfectly normal blond man in a perfectly normal button up shirt and thin-rimmed glasses pacing before a perfectly normal desk. I saw a large print of the Phi decimal in gold against black paper. Math person? On the other side of it was a morbid picture of a man crucified on a fourth dimensional cross. The only other thing of note was that the desk was in a different place in front of a floor to ceiling window looking out at a landscape I didn't recognize.
"I see a blond man pacing. The touch screen is facing the other way and there's no chairs. There's posters on the wall, one of the Golden Mean and the other one of a crucifixion. One wall has been replaced by a large window."
She nodded. "What shirt is he wearing?"
Odd question. "White button up, black stripes on the shoulders and a black and silver tie."
Her eyes shifted again and this time I was sure of it. Someone was in the room with her. Consultant? "That will do."
"I have a question of my own." Her eyebrow quirked questioningly. I smiled. "How'd you lose your eye?"
The Chief Director laughed as she stood up, slipping her amber rimmed glasses back on her face. I felt amusement and an older pain. "Later, maybe. I'll keep in touch."
Truth.
The screen went blank.
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