"We were starting to think you weren't going to show," Karen said above the regular din at the Rage.

"I had some things I had to take care of before coming tonight," I explained while sitting down beside her.  "Where's Jon?"

"Probably collecting beer bottles," Carl snickered.

"He's working on something for school, but he said he'll try and make it," Jenny explained.

Despite the steady and strong flow of the crowd's emotions, I had my empathic senses focused on just the people at the table.  I immediately sensed Jenny was holding back on the explanation, but that wasn't necessarily cause for suspicion.

"Chris couldn't make it either?" I queried.

"She's here...  Somewhere," Virginia stated, looking over some heads a moment before repeating, "Somewhere."

"Anybody thirsty?" Karen offered, pulling a few iced down Busch beers in glass bottles from underneath the table and setting them in the middle of the tabletop.

"Shit, Karen.  How many do you have down there?" I asked as I looked beside my feet and saw a cooler at her feet.

"Enough," Virginia answered for Karen, grabbing one and having Carl open it for her.

"Jon's sure going to wish he hadn't missed this," Carl said while he and Karen each took one as well.  "You got these in his honor?"

"Dishonor you mean," Jenny laughed.

"Something like that," Karen grinned.

"Do I see beer at this table?" Mike crowed as he walked up, startling most of us.

"Take one and shut the hell up," Karen hissed, tossing him one, which he nearly dropped.

"What's the matter?  Busch not good enough for you?" Karen asked me when she noticed I hadn't taken one yet.

"I'm not really much of a beer drinker," I explained honestly.  "I'm more a Jack Daniels man."

"Now here's a man with the same heart as mine," Mike clamored just before spotting an empty chair three tables down and hurrying over to grab it.

"Well have a beer anyway," Karen insisted, slapping a bottle into the palm of my right hand.

Not wishing to create any waves, I opened the bottle and took a swig, then after making a slight face, I smacked my lips and said, "Ahhh."

After Mike squeezed in between myself and Carl, the talk turned towards some stuff on TV and then somehow got on the subject of what color of underpants we had on.

"If I had known there'd be a contest, I would have worn my Elvis briefs," Carl joked.

"Elvis?" Virginia exclaimed while Jenny started laughing with abandon.

"Heh... Wait.  Briefs?" I queried.

"Hey, don't go making fun of the King!" Carl said seriously.

"Oh brother," Karen said under her breath to which I gave her a look of agreement.

Suddenly Chris walks up and announced, "I think I'm love!"

"Oh brother!" Karen exclaimed much louder than the moment before while the others gave a mixture of groans and comments like "That's nice, Chris.."

"This is real...  This time," Chris sighed, holding her hands against her chest with a far look in her eyes.

"You say that every time some guy smiles in your direction," Virginia remarked.

"But I felt it.  I felt it in here when I..."

"CHRIS!" Karen shrieked, cutting her off and scrambling over me to get to her.

"What's the mat...  Oh..  OH!" Chris exclaimed as she noticed me sitting there.  "Sorry, I didn't know... Uhm..."

As Karen and Chris headed for the ladies room, the tension which had shot up all around the table started coming back down as I pretended not to notice anything strange going on.  Then when I took an impassive deep drink of my beer, the level dropped almost back to normal.

"I take it Chris is a hopeless romantic?" I asked no one particular.

"That's an understatement," Virginia gasped out.

"You know, I used to be like that," Jenny offered.

"Yeah right," Mike chuckled.

"I was..." Jenny insisted.

"So what happened?" Carl dared to ask.

"My boyfriend took me parking and tried to get to third base."

"And succeeded," I added with certainty after feeling her out a moment.

"Yeah, I can believe that," Mike laughed while Jenny's cheeks turned red.

I decided if I was going to get the information I wanted, I was going to have to get them as comfortable as possible around me, especially after Chris's blooper.  So I drained my beer and asked Virginia for another, and was happy to see everyone else following my lead.

"My dad calls me a hopeless romantic," I stated for the record after letting out a decently long burp.

Mike's burp made mine sound like a baby's, but when Carl tried to out do Mike's, he accidentally burped out the other end as well which cracked everyone up.

"So are you a hopeless romantic?" Virginia asked after everyone scooted away from Carl a bit.

"From his point of view, definitely," I said before blowing across the lip of my bottle at different angles until I got a tone.

"My dad would kill me if he knew..." Mike commented.

"Knew what?" I asked.

The tension shot up a bit again, but Mike handled it coolly by saying, "That I wasn't a virgin.  He's a bit of preacher, you know?"

"My dad is no holy man, but he's not all bad either," I said.

"My dad couldn't care less if I was a virgin or not," Carl said.

"That's because your parents are weird," Virginia said with authority.

"They can afford to be weird," Jenny said.  "I wish my parents had money like yours."

"So what's stopping you from making it happen?" Carl asked after a long burp.

"Oh, like I could just go rob a bank and get away with it," Jenny huffed.

"When MY dad caught me making out with a boy when I was fifteen," Virginia interrupted.  "I was grounded for a month.  No phone, no TV, nothing but homework and books."

"Heh.  My dad took videos of my first sex."

"Uh uh.."

"Bull shit."

I looked Virginia in the eyes and said "And he and my mom ate popcorn while they watched it with her parents."

Everyone but Virginia stated their disbelief, for she had felt the truth of my statement in the brief empathic link.

"Nobody but sickos would take videos of their kids having sex," Mike insisted.  "You're making it up."

"Just ask Suzi.  She'll tell ya."

"All right.  I'll ask her tomorrow at the meeting..."

"You could also ask Joey.  His parents watched it too."

"Man, all your parents are sickos..." Mike stated before draining his beer, burping, then noticing everyone else was looking uncomfortable.

"What's up with all you?"

"He knows, stupid," Jenny hissed.

"Knows what?"

"That you're all part of the Group," I stated.

"About fucking time," Mike laughed, throwing his arm over my shoulders roughly.  "Now lets go get some real booze."

"I think I've had enough," I said, carefully removing his arm from my shoulder and standing up.  "In fact, I've had enough of this whole charade.  Thanks for the beer and the small talk.  Nice knowing you."

I took four steps away before realizing I needed to sober up a bit before I could navigate the crowd as it was.  But then it occurred to me I didn't have to restrain myself from using my abilities in front of them any more, and simply blanketed the room to make a three foot wide walk space from my position all the way to the door.

But just as I reached the main floor, Jon came through the door looking very bewildered by my walk path until he spotted me, then stood there with this stunned expression as I walked up to him, pulled the foot long three inch diameter tube from my coat and handed it to him saying, "Batteries are not included."

I awoke the next morning to a mild headache... and Joey sitting on the edge of my bed.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," I echoed him, glancing at the clock to see it was 10:23.

"Things didn't go very well last night," he stated.

"Not exactly how I had hoped, no," I admitted.  "Why?  What's up?"

"All the newbies were acting kind of weird this morning at the Group meeting."

"What do you mean, weird?"

He shrugged and said, "They just weren't themselves.  Kind of down, I guess.  They just didn't have the enthusiasm newbies usually have."

"Newbies?"

"Yeah.  Most of them only just passed the coin test in January.  And only about half of them have developed their voice."

"Really?  Why didn't you mention this to me before?" I complained.

"I thought you already knew," he said frowning.  "Why?  Does it make a difference?"

"Kind of," I said, sitting up and frowning myself.  "I think."

"So what happened?" Joey asked patiently.

After I told him, he asked, "So you're pissed at them because..."

"Because they set me up, Joey.  They found out about my rendezvous with the two girls I was meeting at the Rave that first night I went there alone.  I spent most of the day yesterday tracking down the real cause of the emergency that had kept the girls from showing up.  It wasn't just a coincidence that Karen bumped into me that night and asked me to join them at their table.  They planned the whole thing."

"Which one's Karen?" Joey queried.

My eyebrow shot up while I flashed him an mental image of her, then realized he probably didn't know all the voices by name, the newbies even more so.

"Not that it matters, but Karen's still a mute."

"You said you tested them with the coin?"

"Yeah.  That's how we've grown so large over the past couple of years.  Every semester we test all the new students during the first week or so.  Sarah used to borrow my coin to do it, but now I'm the official recruiter," he said with a short grin.

"So that's why they all know you and Suz," I concluded.

"I guess," he said, holding something back.

"And?"

Joey sighed, then said, "And that's probably why they went through all this trouble to get to you.  The first two weeks of this semester I had all my classes plus recruiting to do, so I didn't have any time to help you settle in and do the stuff with you like I wanted to.  They must have picked up on how worried I was about you feeling welcome here after the group attacked you and all...  I think they were just trying to help bridge the gap between you and the Group."

After about a minute or so of silence, Joey asked, "So what are you going to do?"

I fell back onto my back and groaned, "I don't know.  I can't help but feel they wronged me by tricking me like that...  But..."

"You're thinking about giving them a second chance," Joey concluded.

"I guess.  That's if they'll even see me to give me a second chance."

"I don't think that'll be too much of a problem.  Three of them are upstairs with Suz."

"Now who's setting me up!" I groaned before throwing a pillow in his face.

"Hey!" he said, returning fire with the same pillow.  "I'm just the love slave following orders.  Suz is the mastermind behind this setup.  But if it makes you feel any better, I don't think they know you live here."

Carl, Jenny, and Mike were sitting on Suzi's couch watching Suzi's copy of the tape my dad had made of our sex that faithful night so long ago.  I stood there watching them exchange bursts of telepathic messages to each other, realizing that these three were probably the only ones who had gained full conscious control over their newly discovered abilities.

One by one all three leaned forward in interest as the Suz-ball portion got underway.  When Jenny glanced at Suzi and asked, "Didn't that hurt?", she noticed me and then hesitated before saying, "Hi."

"You're missing the best part," I said, grinning when the two guys looked up in surprise, then motioned for them to go back to watching the video.

Their exchange of telepathic messages increased sharply for a minute, but then as the video approached the climax of the scene, they practically stopped until it was over, at which point Suzi hit the stop button and flipped off the TV.

"I guess you weren't making it up," Mike said apologetically.

"I didn't make any of it up," I said while sitting down on the arm of the couch.

"We didn't make anything up either," Jenny assured me.

"I know you didn't.  I would have sensed an outright lie."

"We were just trying to be your friend," Jenny added.

"Look, I think I understand why you guys did what you did, but I didn't last night because I didn't know the details.  I'm sorry I led YOU on when I could have just told you from the start.  But now I need to know what you want from me.  Besides a drinking buddy to share kinky stories with."

They looked at each other a few moments, then after several telepathic exchanges, Carl spoke for the first time since I had entered saying, "Before we actually met you, we thought you'd be a big show off and we could sort of learn some tricks off you."

"But you didn't do anything," Jenny continued.  "Or at least nothing I could detect the first night.  And when everybody liked you, I talked Mike into standing watch the second night so I could see what you were really like."

"Who stood watch last night?" I asked with suspicion.

"Mike was supposed to," Carl said accusingly.

"When Karen brought out the beer, I said, 'fuck this shit,'" Mike explained.  "No way was I going to miss out on free beer a second time."

"Like you don't get drunk every night," Jenny remarked.

"Yeah, but that's different.  It's not as fun if you can't get caught."

"So you found I wasn't as big of a show off as some would lead you to believe," I said to put the conversation back on track while giving Joey a look.

Joey shrugged as Carl said, "Yeah, but then you did that...  thing with the crowd last night.  That was awesome."

"Yeah, that was too cool," Mike said brightly.  "Nobody noticed."

"Will you stop saying that?" Jenny groaned, then explained to us, "That's all he said last night after you left.  Nobody noticed.  Nobody noticed..."

"It was just a blanket command with a subconscious amendment," I said modestly before looking over at Joey and asking him, "Don't you guys teach them anything?"

"Telepathy 101 only covers getting control over their abilities.  We don't cover blanket commands until TE310."

"You don't seriously have class numbers for telepathy," I said with a cautious look on my face.

"They're not in the course listing, but yeah, we do," Joey said grinning.

"You're shitting me," I said with disbelief.

"No he isn't," Carl assured me.  "And TE101 is the stupidest class.  We don't do anything... interesting.."

"That's because you gained control over your voice the moment you realized them," Joey objected sternly  "But for someone like Christina who's still trying to get a grasp on them after nearly a year of trying, it can make all the difference."

"But why hold everyone back for the few who need it?" Jenny argued.

Suzi waved Joey silent before he could respond, then asked, "What did you do in TE101 Friday?"

"Practiced controlling our arms and legs," Jenny snorted.  "The same thing we always do."

"Yeah.  It's so lame," Mike asserted.  "I mean, what's the point of us doing it over and over when we already....  HEY!!!  What the fuck!"

His hands were feeling up his chest, obviously without his intending them to do so.

I was snickering softly to myself before Suzi slapped him in the face a couple of times with his own hands and explained, "This was the hardest lesson I learned last semester, and I didn't learn it in a class, but during an attack.  You can't protect yourself or anyone else if you can't control your own body over a stronger or more experienced voice.

"So until you can control your limbs telepathically as easily as you can normally, you're not going to be shown anything else.  If we did, it would be like sending you out to do battle with a sword and a shield, but without clothes or armor."

"Nicely put," I thought to Suz before saying out loud, "On guard!"

"What?" she peeped, then as she started turning in place on her tiptoes with her arms up like a ballerina, he cried, "Timmy!  This isn't fair!  You're as familiar with my limbs as I am!"

"Which is my point," I said, making her do a little curtsy before terminating my control streams.  "Armor doesn't do you much good if you don't have the shield and sword to compliment it."

"So much for not showing off," Jenny snickered.

"But I do agree with you Suz," I assured her as her eyes tried to throw lightening bolts at me to strike me dead.  "Learning control over your own body is probably the best first step."

"Which is why he could do that to Suzi so easily" Joey explained to defend Suzi's honor.  "Tim got a lot of practice in controlling our limbs as much as his own when he was starting out."

"And you know, if I had known the cause like I do now, I would have stopped when my head started hurting during those three ways."

"You really don't know for sure what caused it," Joey reminded me.

"Whoosh...." Jenny said, whooshing her hand over her head in emphasis.

"Sorry...  Old discussion," I said.  "What was the point of this conversation again?"

"I don't know, but I sure could use a beer," Mike announced.

"Poor baby," Jenny cooed mockingly.

"You wanted to know what we wanted with you," Carl said.  "But in honesty, I guess it's up to you to decide what you're willing to do with us."

"If nothing else we can just meet for drinks on Saturday nights like we've been doing," Jenny offered.

"But you GOT to teach me that path thing," Mike insisted.

"The drinks we definitely can do.  The blanket command... we'll see.  Uhm... So are you three the only ones who can use your voice?"

We spent a good hour talking before I ran down to my apartment for a quick shower, then dashed off to meet Shelly for our first official study session at the library.

To my disappointment, she didn't show.

Shelly came in late to class on Monday, and after one look at her I knew immediately something was wrong, but I resisted probing her to learn what it was so I could try and consol her after class with a more natural perspective.  Granted, my empathic senses didn't really allow for that too much, but over time I had learned it was better to go through the process of asking questions and reacting to their answers naturally than popping into their heads and getting it all at once without their knowledge.

"I take it you forgot our study session yesterday?" I asked her after class as she got her things together to leave.

"I guess I did.  Sorry," she said, her spirit almost not existent.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like hell," I said sympathetically.

"You would too if you had slept in a car the last two nights," she blurted out.

"In a car?  It was below freezing last night!  Why the.."

"Please, just forget it.  I don't want to talk about it," she sputtered out as she walked away in a hurry.

I grabbed my bag and hurried out after her, catching up to her just as she left the building.

"You don't have class now do you?" I asked.

"No."

"So do you want to go to the library?" I offered.

"No! I want to be alone, okay?"

"Okay, okay..." I said, putting four or five feet between us, but continued to walk parallel to her.

"Look, will you please just go away?"

I shrugged and said, "I'm just going in the same direction as you are."

"Oh," she said.  "Then where are you going?"

"Where are you going?" I countered.

"I asked you first."

"Well, then it depends."

"Depends on what?"

"Depends on where you're going."

"Look, I don't KNOW where I'm going!  Just go away!"

"Okay.  As long as you know where you're going," I said, turning and walking away, leaving her understandably baffled.

Fifteen minutes later, Shelly walked into the dorm's cafeteria and got in line for food.  When she came out I directed her attention towards me, then all I had to do was push the other chair at my table out with my foot for her to give up and come over.

"How did you know I was coming here?"

"I told you I was going the same direction as you were," I said, avoiding answering the question directly.

"What do you want?" she sighed.

"To listen."

"Listen?"

"To why you're sleeping in a car instead of your dorm room."

"Maybe I like it.  What business is it of yours where I sleep?!" she demanded.

Switching gears, I simply commanded, "Sit."

After her ass came to rest on the seat, I looked into her surprised face and said, "Either tell me you're going to go sleep in your dorm bed tonight, and mean it, or tell me why you can't.  It's your choice."

"I...  I'll sleep in my dorm bed tonight," she stuttered out, her cheeks drained of color.

"Good.  Now relax and eat.  I only have an hour to study with you."

As I had said before, that logic class was my favorite that semester.  Not only because it came easy to me, but it gave me new insight into how the mind perceived decision paths and how it made assumptions on imprecise statements.

Okay, so in English that means I saw a new way to telepathically manipulate a person into seeing only two or more possible choices of my design without affecting their ability to choose between them.  The "assumptions on imprecise statements" thing just gave me a better understanding of how politicians could basically do the same thing without the use of telepathy.  Needlessly to say my way worked better.

After going over her test with her, I managed to get her to commit to working after class the next week or two to get her caught up.  I left her sitting at the table reworking part of her test without really knowing what her exact problem had been, but it was easy enough to guess it had had to do with her attraction towards her roommate.

I got to Suzi's just as her phone rang, and through Suzi, Eric and I had a pretty good conversation.

This might sound weird, but it was good to hear he was taking interest in guys again.  And I was following his interests with similar interest of my own.  In the past that kind of conversation would have made my eyes gloss over in boredom.  I made a very loud "AAACK!" noise when I suddenly realized I grasped the sexiness of the male butt that she and Eric had described to me so many times without my really understanding it.  I had always known what a bubble butt looked like, but suddenly I knew what made one more sexually inviting over another.  It's a...  Well you know...  The more..  Uhm..  Shit.  I guess you just have to like bubble butts to understand them.

Tuesday on my lunch break I went in and saw Perry about scheduling time for myself.  To my surprise he immediately grunted his consent, so I then carefully mentioned I wanted to also observe a few others as they worked without competing against them if I could.

The man acted very passive.  Not polite or pleasant, just...  passive.  I think he said a total of ten words, and that included the grunt hello and the grunt goodbye.

Wait.  Come to think of it, I think all he did was grunt.

No.. He did say, "Damn right," to my suggestion I wouldn't compete against those I watched, so he hadn't been just humoring me without listening to what I was saying.  At least I think.

Anyway, in his shabby office he flipped a freestanding chalkboard to the other side revealing two sets of calendar month blocks painted onto the board.  On the one filled in as the current month of March, he indicated I could choose either of the two days that week where only two people's names were signed.  The rest of the days already had three.

I signed my name to both which, when he noticed I had done so, he hit me in the nose a couple of times with the eraser and indicated I had to erase one.  I swiped one off and ran out of the office to violently sneeze two or three times, then managed to tell him thanks for his time and I would see him Thursday.  You already know what his reply was.

Shelly seemed better Wednesday, and as we worked on the latest assignment together after class, she opened up a little about herself; things like she came from Ohio and loved coffee ice cream with chocolate syrup.  Nothing of what I was really interested in came out, but then I didn't expect her to ever admit anything to me.  Unfortunately, because she was royally sucking in the class, she was making the conscious effort to pay attention better, thus my supply of fresh lesbian daydreams seemed to have cut itself off.

Skipping classes for telepathic excursions obviously was not new to me, and since I had been keeping a pretty good track record that semester, I didn't feel the least bit guilty about skipping classes all day that Thursday.

I showed up at the admin building at nine o'clock sharp, just as the schedule had said, but ended up waiting over an hour before my two competitors finally wandered in.

"Oh great," the dark haired slightly over weight guy said when he saw me.  "Don't tell me you're here to play."

Taken aback, I only peeped out a "I guess I am."

"Look at it this way, Frankie," the shorter, skinnier pug nosed sandy brown haired guy said.  "We'll be the first to see how good he really is."

Sensing they were trying to intimidate me to favor their odds, I smiled brightly and asked, "Have you ever seen a pig fuck a cow?"

When they opened their mouths to respond, all they heard come out of their mouths was oinks out of Don, the pug nosed guy, and moos out of Frankie.

"Is that the best you can do?" Don said as he blocked my streams. "Anyone can do chicken shit tricks like that."

"You're right.  I'm sorry," I said, slightly grinning.  "Do one of you want to go first?"

"Seeing that you're still pretty new to all this, I'll go first," Frankie announced.

"There's not much to choose from," I commented as the one woman and three men lined up before us.

"These aren't the only choices," Frankie simply stated as more started filing in from the other section of the building.

There were seventeen people in all, three of them were only like fifteen years old too.  I knew the moment Frankie sent the three girls back to the other room without even considering them that I didn't like him, Don, or the stupid game that prioritized ease of cleaning over all else.

Despite this, I have to give credit where credit is due.  Frankie was good.  In fact I would have to say his cleaning was the most efficient and thorough I had ever seen a non-empathic telepath accomplish.

This isn't to say I wanted to copy his methods though.  Far from it.  He was horribly brutal to the subjects mind, causing all sorts of intense emotions, many times conflicting, all geared towards illuminating what mental patterns were natural and what weren't.

Despite the seemingly cruelty, the end result was a fully command-free mind in only thirty-five minutes.  I knew it would have taken me twice as long doing it my own way, but Dan had only cried a little during his cleaning and his condition had been several orders of magnitude worse.  After both Don and I verified she was clean, the zombified woman that was lead away by a grad student and another woman who I assumed was a nurse of some kind.

Don insisted I go next, but when he saw I was focusing my attention on the three girls, he warned me, "You'll probably want to ask to do a light probe on those three if you're serious about trying them."

"Isn't that against the rules?"

"Let him learn the hard way, Don," Frankie said while lazily stretching out on the couch.

"And have Perry say we let him choose a ressy candidate without warning him?  He'd scalp both of us."

Frankie sighed like he was about to give away one of his best tricks and said, "I allow Tim to perform one light scan on each of the three ressy candidates.  Happy?"

"I allow Tim to perform one light scan on each of the three ressy candidates," Don repeated, then added, "Yes."

"So what was that all about?" I asked.

"Just say out loud I will now scan each of the three ressy candidates and do it," Don said patiently, then thought to me, "The walls have ears, and Perry loves formality."

"I will now scan each of the three ressy candidates," I said out loud, then began a light scan on the first girl.

After I scanned all three, I sat down on the chair I had placed in front of them with a deflated sigh.

"They're pretty messed up," I admitted.

"Too messed up to clean them and have anything left afterwards worth the trouble," Don confirmed.

"I guess.  Sorry girls."

So I ended up picking one of the adult males who I remembered from last time and cleaned his mind in just under four hours.

Don and Frankie spent another hour verifying he was clean, and it really upset me that Frankie put him through the same hell he had the first one after I had been so careful to keep the discomfort to a minimum.

I came to accept Don as a pretty decent guy, so when they announced I had gotten everything and called down for the someone to pick up another one, Don's comment, "That was pretty good.  You might have some new competition, Frankie," was high praise to me.

Don wasn't bad himself, but nowhere near as efficient as Frankie, or myself for that matter.  He finished the butch looking woman in under three hours, but I found a couple of things he missed, and to my astonishment, Frankie found another after I claimed she was clean.

All in all, I felt pretty good that night about the whole experience.  I had learned from Joey that Frankie was the all around champion of the game, and nobody but Don ever tried to go nose to nose with him since he never lost and loved to rub it in.

I really started to despise the game itself though.  Several times during the evening I had pondered on how to reduce my time in order to meet and exceed Frankie's speed.  I was pretty positive that in order to do so I would have to resort to his methods, and that I absolutely would not do.

After classes on Friday, Suzi and I went over to Joey's to go out with his family for Margaret's birthday.  Joey didn't mention that Sarah would be there, so I was greeted by Sarah's dirty look when I opened the front door and walked in without knocking (as per Margaret's standing orders).

"Hey," Joey greeted us next, purposely walking right into the entryway's wall with Tommy hanging off his back.  "Tommy, watch where you're steering," he joked, producing another giggle from the eight-nearly-nine year old.

Joey bounced from wall to wall as he led us to the family room where Tommy suddenly jumped down from Joey's back and rolled head over heels over to a baby laying on a blanket in the middle of the floor.

"Peek-a-boo!" Tommy sang as he unrolled himself with his face just a foot above the infant's head.

As the baby grinned and chortled it's pleasure to Tommy's surprise visit, Neil came into the room only wearing jeans, his hair and hairless chest still wet from a shower.

"How did it go, Neil?" Suzi queried him.  "Did you beat her?"

"Only barely," Neil said, noticing my eyes on him, then avoided them when I looked up at his eyes.

"Beat who?" I asked, temporarily forgetting the other pressing question concerning the infant on the floor.

"McDonaldson," Joey answered for him.  "She challenged Neil to a duel this morning."

"Why?" I asked blankly.

"Because she's a sl..  a...  you know," Suzi said as Tommy gave the baby a raspberry on its tummy.

"Ahh," I said.  "And if she had won, you..."

"Mom!" Tommy interrupted.  "Kathy's stinky!"

"Would have been sleeping at her place this weekend," Joey snickered.

"Well then change her, Tommy!" Sarah's reply came.  "I'm helping your Grandma."

"Yeah, helping her talk," Tommy said under his breath, then looked up at us and said, "Anybody else want to do it?"

"What's the matter, Tommy?  I thought you liked changing her diapers," Joey needled him.

"That's only when she doesn't shit in them," he complained, standing up and bending over to pick up the drooling child.

"Then I'll help you, Tommy," Suzi offered.  "Joey's been telling me how good you are at it."

"That's because Kathy likes me to do it," he said smartly, leading Suzi towards the back hall carrying the baby almost over his shoulder he had her so high.

"Because you entertain her so much," Joey remarked.

As soon as Tommy was out of sight, I punched Joey in the arm and complained, "Why didn't you tell me?!?"

"About what?" Joey said honestly.

"About the baby," I said in a very hushed voice.

"What?" Joey said, astonished, as Neil snickered and headed down the back hall as well.  "Shit, Tim.  How could not have heard about her?  Didn't your mom or dad tell you about the dinner they had over here?"

"No," I said, baffled.  "They knew?"

"Shit, Tim, they knew even before my mom and dad knew."

"Wait a minute," I said, sensing there was more to this.  "Let's start over here.  First, who's the rug rat?"

"Duh...  Kathy.  My niece."

"That's what I thought," I confirmed.  "So how did my mom and dad know before your mom and dad?"

Joey sighed, then motioned we go to his room to talk privately.

Neil was sitting on Joey's bed putting on his second sock when we walked in, his eyes staying firmly focused on his foot instead of looking up like his instincts would have liked.

Joey explained the mess Sarah had gotten herself into in an attempt to save her failing marriage.  I was truly shocked that Sarah had actually insisted on Wally altering her to feel the things she felt for Stan from back when she had been his slave.  I always felt that Sarah was too uptight to ever allow someone else to mettle with her perception, especially like that.

Kathy had been born the first week of December, a month earlier than Sarah had originally predicted when she had told her family of her pregnancy.  While Kathy wasn't born premature, there had been a few complications during her birth and had spent the first week of her life in intensive care.

An hour later at the restaurant, Joey mentioned out of the blue how I hadn't known about Sarah having Kathy until I saw Kathy that day and "had to ask who the rug rat was."

Margaret immediately questioned me, "Didn't you get the pictures I sent you?  I sent you almost a whole roll of just Kathy."

"I... Yeah, I uhh.. I got'em..." I stuttered out.

"Didn't you think it was odd she sent you so many pictures of a baby if it wasn't important?" Sarah drilled me.

"But I didn't know!" I tried to explain.  "My mom wasn't there, I didn't think about asking my dad, and I tried calling you, but nobody was home...  And then I got into my painting, I guess I forgot about it after that.  Nobody ever, ever," I said while giving Joey and Suzi blaming glances, "mentioned anything about...  a baby."

As Joey started trying to make it my parent's fault for never saying anything to me, the thought of where I would have put a baby in the paintings, followed by the concern they would want me to add it now made me realize ...

"Say...  Where are you keeping my Christmas present anyway?  I haven't seen it since I wrapped it up!"

When Joey exchanged anxious glances with his parents, I started getting anxious myself.

"What's the matter?  You didn't lose..."

"It's down in the basement," Joey's dad said uncomfortably.

"It sort of got messed up," Joey added.

"Messed up?  How?" I said rather alarmed.

"It's my fault," Margaret explained.  "I told them to put it in the garage until Christmas Eve because it was so big.  We didn't know paint would crack from being in the cold."

"The paint cracked?" I moaned.  "On how many?"

"How many?" she asked.

"How many of the canvases did the paint crack on?" I clarified.

They all looked at each other in confusion making me realize their mistake.

"Joey!" I laughed.  "You dork!  I told you you would have to use a crowbar to pry off the stuff I shipped it in!"

"What?  What do you mean?"

I rolled my eyes happily and said, "What you guys thought was my painting was just my first attempt that I used to make the shipping case.  I tried cleaning the canvas off with turpentine, but it wasn't coming off easily, so I just used it, another messed up canvas, and some damaged frames to build this super duper

shipping case to hold all five inside it."

"Five?" Joey exclaimed as Margaret sighed with relief and Tom laughed.

"I told you you would have to tear it apart.  Didn't you think it was kind of... thick for painting?"

"Well, yeah...  But..."

"And you thought I was getting old for thinking it was too heavy," Tom accused Joey lightheartedly.

"Am I still in it?" Tommy interjected.

"I don't know, Tommy," I said, grinning like a fox.  "You're just going to have to wait until we get back to see."

"You have to be in it, Tommy," Joey analyzed.  "Because we talked about it on the phone Christmas night, and I made a big deal about you being the center of the scene."

"Cool!" Tommy chirped, then sniffed a few times and moaned, "Mom..."

"Tommy, you must have dirty diaper Radar," Neil remarked as Sarah confirmed Kathy had soiled her diaper again.

"You would too if you were down here at my height," Tommy complained, holding his nose as his mother got up to take Kathy to the ladies room for another diaper changing.

Tommy was no longer the quiet bashful boy I had first met three years previous.  If anything, he was just the opposite.  He wasn't obnoxious or anything, but he was constantly clowning around.  Five or six times his mom or Margaret had to tell him to settle down during dinner, but that naturally only lasted a few minutes before wearing off.

After all the times Joey's mom had washed his mouth out with soap as a kid before giving up on breaking him of his inherited use of cuss words, I was really surprised at how tolerant Margaret was of Tommy's frequent use of 'shit'.  I never heard a single 'fuck' from him at the table, but Tommy didn't have any reservation of using 'shit' and I sensed he purposely used it as much as he could to make him feel more grown up.

Sarah objected when Tommy wanted to ride back in Joey's car with Suzi, Neil, and I, but when Joey gave her a look, she sighed before warning Tommy, "If you give them any shit, you'll have diaper duty the rest of the week."

"Shit!" Tommy cried, then after a moment of indecision he ran up to her and gave her a big kiss on the cheek before scurrying off after us.

"You sure know how to play your cards," I remarked to Tommy after he climbed in the back with Neil and I and shut the door.  "I bet your mom is still smiling."

"My friend Josh says if you give them a reward whenever you get your way, they'll let you get away with more."

"Your friend is pretty smart," Suzi chuckled.

"Josh is going to be a spy when he grows up.  He says you have to know how to man... man-upe.."

"Manipulate?" I offered.

"Yeah.  You have to know how to Manip-e-ulate people just to get into spy school."

"How old is Josh again?" Joey demanded while Neil and I laughed.

"He's nine," Tommy stated with indifference, but secretly loving the attention he was getting.

"Shit.  I don't remember being that conniving at nine," Joey remarked.

"How old were we when we conned your dad into taking us to see that rated R movie?"

"Rated R?" Tommy queried.

"Oh, we were a _lot_ older than nine," Joey said cautiously.

"How old?" Tommy begged.

"Older than you," I confirmed.  "We were definitely in the double digits by then."

"Oh..." Tommy said with disappointment, then suddenly exclaimed, "Double digits!  I'm only..."

Tommy silently counted the months left before his next birthday, then asked, "In one year and three months, can I go see a rated R movie with you Uncle Joey?  I'll be in my double digits..."

"No...  Your mom would kill me if I did that," Joey said firmly.

"But what if she said it was okay?"

"Look, Tommy," I said, feeling guilty for having started the whole idea, "Do you know why movies are rated R?"

"Yeah, because they put stupid naked ladies in them and, and, say things like shit and God damn.  But I don't want to see naked people, and I won't hear anything I don't hear at school, so..."

"The movie Joey and I saw...  What was the name of it Joey?  I can't remember."

"Uhm...  I don’t know..."

"I can't think of it either... Anyway, we wanted to see it because it was about this military academy for boys that for some reason people wanted to shut down.  Only the boys didn't want them to shut it down, so they barricaded themselves in and shot at anyone who went near the place."

"Cool," Tommy said, his eyes full of interest.

"The National Guard surrounded the place, and the kids moms and dads tried to talk the boys into giving up and coming out and stuff.  Then someone accidentally dropped a loaded gun that went off, or something like that, and everybody started shooting back at each other in defense."

"Awesome!  So the kids killed everybody?"

"Shit, Tommy!" Joey exclaimed.  "No!  One of the boys that was our age got shot and died.  It was awful.  I got so sick to my stomach we had to leave before the end of the movie, and then I threw up in the car."

"And I had nightmares about it for weeks," I added.

"So then don't take me to see any stupid movies like that," Tommy argued.

"You missed the point, Tommy," Suzi said.  "They rate the movies R to warn kids that the movie has stuff in it they really won't want to see."

"Bull shit!" Tommy spat.

The car suddenly veered onto the shoulder as Joey slammed on the brakes, then just as we were all coming to our senses to ask what was wrong, Joey turned around and angrily said to Tommy, "Don't you EVER fucking talk that way to Suzi again, you filthy mouthed piece of shit.  I'm not taking you to see a rated G, PG, PG-13, or R movie ever if you don't say you're sorry right now and mean it!"

"I'm sorry," he whimpered with wide innocent eyes.  "I'm sorry Suzi."

"Okay, Joey," Suzi said gently while he continued to brow beat the withering boy.  "Let's get moving or the others are going to wonder where we are."

"Yes ma'am," Joey said automatically as he gave Tommy one last warning glance and turned around to drive.

It was quiet for the remaining four or five minutes of the trip back, Joey's guilt from overreacting and Tommy's broken spirits making me feel even more uncomfortable than the others felt.  I had been the one to mention the movie, after all.

I knew Joey was just fooling to still be mad when he ordered Tommy to remain in the car after pulling into the driveway, but Tommy didn't and was scheming how he could soften up his uncle to reduce the impending punishment.

If Joey had known that, he probably wouldn't have gotten down and offered the boy a piggy back ride inside, but like everyone else he assumed the kid didn't think like that even after Tommy having admitted he played his mom for a dope.

Margaret and Tom were both already in the basement by the time we got inside and removed our coats.  Tommy raced ahead of Neil and Suzi as they headed to join them while Joey and I stepped out into the garage and picked out the tools to pry open my Trojan painting.

"Shit, I see what you meant," I exclaimed when I saw the cracked and flaking paint on the exterior.  "It wasn't like that when I wrapped it up in brown paper."

"I hope the ones inside are okay," Margaret said for the third time.

"This was probably caused by the turpentine drying out," I said after taking a closer look.  "I kept brushing it on until I saw the paint was just getting mushy and gave up."

"Well, you packed the thing," Joey said, handing me the wedge and hammer.

"I'll help, but I'm not going to do it alone," I insisted.

"I'll help!" Tommy said, popping up between us and holding out his hand for a tool.

"Tommy, why don't you go run up and get your mom," Margaret said firmly.

"Awe..  Please ma-ma?"

"Go on.."

Tommy's huff was shortly followed by his slow stomping feet on the wooden stairs which only made Margaret hiss at him, "Tommy!  The baby is asleep!"

Tommy tiptoed the rest of the way up.

Neil, Joey, Tom, and I were all working to pry off the center frame holding the two halves together when Tommy tiptoed all the way back down the stairs and up to his grandma to whisper, "Mom said she'll see it when it gets hung."

"That girl!" Margaret huffed before marching herself upstairs, giving Tommy a turn to hiss, "Grandma, the baby is sleeping!" from her not so quiet footsteps.

Once we had the four sides of the center frame off, we all waited for Margaret to come back down before going any further.  Tommy peeked under the top half a few times, but naturally didn't see anything since I had individually wrapped each painting as well.

The moment Margaret stepped on the top step of the basement, Tommy rushed up and lifted the top section off and tossed it aside, then got yelled at by Joey for doing so.

"Is Tommy making trouble?" Sarah asked threateningly.

"No," Tommy said before anyone else could.

"Tim, I think you over did wrapping this present," Margaret remarked as she joined us all standing around it.

"It's just that my favorite part of getting a present is unwrapping it," I offered as I knelt down, picked up the top most painting, and handed it to her.

As she used her fingers to break the tape holding the brown paper in place, I handed one to Joey, one to Tom, got a surprisingly pleasant thank you from Sarah when I handed her the fourth, then called Tommy over to the larger center piece and said, "If you're really careful, you can open this one, okay?"

"Cool!" he said, falling to his knees and slipping his fingers between the taped edges of the brown paper.

At that point I just sat back and watched as they all removed all three separate layers of brown paper wrapping, Tom beating everyone else by revealing the canvas with Margaret and himself sitting in front of the fire place.

Margaret was very touched by that one and the scene of the wild animals looking in the window which she opened, and Sarah was speechless for a few moments after getting hers open and seeing I had included Gina and Denise in the family portrait.  And she even humorously complimented me on how good of a job I had done on Gina's pose.

Suzi was fussing at me over Joey's, mainly grilling me over who's lipstick was on the cheek of his image standing there blushing with arms crossed, when Tommy flipped the center pane up out of the last layer of paper and made a big "WoW!!"

I got out of the way as the Conners gathered around, getting a hug from behind by Suzi as they started arranging the pictures around the center piece until they got it right.

"Can I hang mine in my room?" Tommy exclaimed.

"No, silly..  They go together," Sarah said gently.

"Then can we hang them all in my room?"

"They're not ours, honey.  They're Grandma's, Grandpa's, and Uncle Joey's."

"But we're in the center one," Tommy insisted before looking at me and pointing out, "And I'm in the center of it.  And Dad, Aunt Gina and Aunt Denise are in it too."

"The label I put on the Christmas paper said to the Conners and Harrisons," I reminded them.  "I'd prefer it if they were kept together, but I guess it's really up to you all to decide what to do with them."

"Then they'll stay here, together," Sarah said firmly.

"But, mom..." Tommy whined before whispering to her, "Then Dad and Aunt Denise won't ever see them."

Despite having attempted to conceal what he had said from everyone else, Margaret had either heard it or guessed what he had said, for I felt her lose her high spirits and became occupied by her understandably bitter feelings towards her son-in-law.

After dropping off Neil at his apartment building where he expected to have an extra bed attendant waiting for him, Suzi let out a contented sigh and said, "I'm so glad you moved out here."

"Me too," I said honestly.

As I parked my car in front of our building, Suzi became disturbed over something, and knowing her like I do I guessed it had to do with the lipstick I painted on Joey's cheek.

"Timmy," she said snapping me out of my staring at her for several long moments.  "When you were painting Joey's..."

"I'll tell you a little secret," I said with a smile.  "Originally that wasn't lipstick on Joey's cheek."

"It wasn't?  Then what was it?"

I gave her a kiss on the cheek approximately in the same location as in the painting, then said softly "Your lips, silly.  You're actually standing there kissing him on the cheek, only I painted over it to hide you since you're not officially part of the family... Yet."

She smiled and gave me a peck on the nose before those damn commands in her head kicked in and made her open the door and get out.

I followed her up and like practically every evening since I had moved there we spent the rest of the evening watching TV and talking before I went back to my apartment for my nightly routine.

That night I dreamed I was a cloud floating around campus peeking in the windows of the buildings to see what was up.  Sometimes I would float inside to watch and listen to the people's activities, entering into a couple of dreams after accidentally being sucked into one.

By chance I drifted into the room of this one guy I had noticed in my morning classes that had a really cute face and butt.  His name was Darwin Evert, and after drifting through Craig, his roommate, and finding his mind deeply asleep, I asserted my will within Craig's body and sat it up.

I had control, yet sensations seemed very distant, and I had difficulty keeping my inhabited body on its feet as I crossed the room to view my object of interest.  In the dim grey light, Darwin looked incredibly cute and sexy, his slightly parted lips inviting my own in an intoxicating way.

My borrowed body's sensations began perking up as I uncovered the young man's shirtless chest and kneeled sloppily to sample his musk, somehow managing to avoid touching him from nearly falling over forward when my balance gave.

I found myself straddling his limp arm between my legs, my groin becoming rather swollen by the nearness of his hand's touch.  I gently reached down to his still covered package beneath the sheets, then carefully felt it out, measuring the size of his testicles and the limp noodle attached.

Stirring in his sleep, the hand between my legs raised itself up and slapped me in my ass.  Slightly shaken, I stepped back and watched as his arm folded itself successfully, then waited several minutes before approaching his silvery face and those inviting lips.

His breath still held the minty odor of his toothpaste, and after inhaling several of his breaths and savoring its flavor, I resisted my urges no more and inserted my tongue into his mouth for a brief but very tasty sample of his mouth's inner juices.

I was up bright and early the next morning to begin my observations of how different cleaning methods affect the recovery of a person's mental normality.

I got to the old admin building around eight intending to scan the people waiting to be cleaned thoroughly, knowing ahead of time I would be invalidating any possible chances to clean them in competition for having advance knowledge of their conditions before hand.

I was just walking down the hall heading for the stairs when one of the doors opened just behind me and I heard this "SHHING!" sound.

I turned just in time to see Perry's cane bounce off the wall a mere foot behind me, then just as I started to react to his swift advance, I found myself falling from my left foot being hooked by the cane's L handle.

In seconds I was face flat on the floor with my hands hog-tied behind me and Perry swiftly immobilizing my feet with my own shoelaces.

"PERRY!  It's only me, for GOD'S SAKE!"

"Learn one thing, grunt!" he snapped at me after finishing with my shoelaces.  "Friend or Foe, I will lunge first, immobilize second, and then kill if I suspect foul play.  Now just be quiet and contemplate your mistake of surprising me while I clean up the damn mess you made me make with my coffee!"

He left me laying there completely helpless for what seemed like forever, and after I got tired of waiting for him to let me loose, I just closed my eyes and began doing what I had gone there to do in the first place.

Seven complete scans later, I was interrupted by Perry's foot slowly stepping on my face.

"What are you doing, grunt?" he asked suspiciously.

"Scanning," I said as best I could, hampered by the foot warping my face's curvature.

"Scanning what?" he said sharply.

"Scanning slaves," I said, finding the pressure becoming more than uncomfortable.

"Why?"

His foot had made it impossible to respond, but since I wasn't completely inert, I simply jerked my body to pull my face away from his shoe and then cried, "ARGH" as he managed to pin my lip to the floor.

"Why?" he coolly repeated.

"To study the after affects of cleaning them!" I cried.  When he didn't seem satisfied with that, I added, "I want to lean how to clean people that helps them recover faster!"

"Such a noble cause for a pathetic excuse for a grunt.  Why don't you just leave these poor people alone and find some whore to play with.  I don't need some punk kid trying to alter my program here."

I freed my lip and spat, "Are you afraid that some punk kid might figure out a better way to help these people?"

Three very hard taps of his cane on the back of my skull later, Perry calmly said, "That's what you get for trying to coerce me with my pride.  The only one who should be afraid here is you, grunt."

Gambling that as long as I was physically immobilized, Perry wouldn't actually do anything to me but bully me, I decided my best option was to explain myself to him and hope he truly was more interested in helping those people under his protection than intimidating me into submission.  So I began rattling off everything I could think of that might have bearing.

"This is a college, damnit.  I am here to learn.  My strongest ambition in life right now is to learn how I can reverse the damage other voices have done to people with the minimum side effects and producing the quickest and most painless recovery possible.

"My voice is stronger than anyone's I know, but I rarely use it except in self-defense.

"I am empathic, and through eye contact I can feel out the distortions in a person's mind without the use of telepathy.

"I am not apart of the group, and I have no intention of ever being.

"I have sworn an oath of celibacy until I marry the girl I proposed to last year.  I have not broken that vow since making it."  That hadn't been exactly true, but he didn't need to know the details, and probably didn't care.

"I don't intend to do anything but observe until I have solid evidence to support my findings.  Then and only then will I try anything different than what I have done in the past in my cleanings.

"Not only do I have voice, but I can see the thought streams of a person's mind without actively probing for them.  A person I once knew had this same telepathic vision and understood it in ways I am only starting to understand.  She could clean a person's mind simply by smoothing out irregular streams.  I think this could...."

"This person was a woman?" Perry demanded suddenly.

"A young woman.  She is... sixteen now," I said, a lump forming in my throat at the very thought of having missed her sweet sixteen birthday.

"How many others do you know that have the sight?" he asked without emotion.

"Only myself, Je... the girl, and an adult woman named Lee Vo who was part of the Group for a couple of months before taking herself and her family into hiding."

The only sound for several minutes was the movement of slaves on the floor above us, the gentle ticking of a clock somewhere, and Perry's rather unique sounding breaths.

Then suddenly I heard the "SHLING" sound again, and I involuntarily shivered as one of the three blades of his cane scraped down my nose, then stopped at my upper lip as he said, "My word is not to be questioned.  If I say jump, you jump, with no questions asked, before or after.  If I say cut your thumb off and suck on it, you do it, or I'll do it for you.  If I ever catch you in a lie, attempting to use any of your hocus pocus on me, or purposely exposing me to danger, no matter how little, I will personally choke you with your own intestines.  Do we have an understanding?"

"And what do I get in exchange for blindly following your orders?  Your trust?" I asked, my parents' business sense demanding me to clarify both sides of the contract.

"I trust no one.  You will only gain my.... Cooperation."

"That's it?"

"I will also let you live," he growled impatiently as he purposely nicked me on the chin with his damn cane's blades.

"Ow! Damnit.  Look, if you agree to do the same for me, I'll..."

"I don't follow anyone's orders, especially a hog-tied grunt's!"

"Okay!  Then just the part about no lying, tricking me, or putting me into danger.  My word won't mean didily-squat to you if you can't trust me, and that won't happen if I can't trust you."

He grunted, then in a blink of an eye his cane raised up and slashed down.

Instead of letting some air into my spine, I found my slightly numb hands free as their bindings fell away.

"I take it we have an agreement?" I asked in surprise.

"If we didn't you would be bleeding in more than just one place right now," he said without emotion as he walked down the hall and went into his office.

I hurriedly untied and retied my shoestrings, then stood at the door of his office waiting for him to direct me somehow.

"What do you want now?" he finally barked.

"Uhm...  I guess I thought you were going to help me or something."

"Look, grunt...  I don't have anything to teach you.  You wanted to observe, go observe.  When you think you've figured out something, you better the hell be sure you're right before trying it or there will be hell to pay.  In any case I don't want to hear about your ideas, conclusions, or how you cleaned all the ressies in one day.  The only thing I want to hear from you is yes sir, and no sir.  Clear grunt?"

"Yes sir," I said, making no attempt to hide my anger.

"Good.  NOW we have an understanding.  Close the door as you leave."

I was rather discouraged after my ordeal with Perry and almost left.  But I stayed and watched some Saturday morning cartoons with the gang upstairs, and by the time the group members scheduled to play the game that day arrived, I was feeling more confident about my overall plan.

Isabella Smith, Jan Riveo, and Steve Kroch were not immediately open to the idea of having someone observe them as they played.  Understandably, they saw my explanation as just as an excuse to learn their tricks.  So I pointed out I eventually would probably compete against them and see their 'tricks' anyway, and I let it slip that I had already seen Frankie's tricks and wasn't about to use his cruel methods despite their efficiency.

For once, my legend worked in my favor.  They didn't seem to doubt I had already competed against Frankie and had faired well.  But what convinced them was their idea that by helping, they could finally see someone beat Frankie and put him in his place.  This of course wasn't my intended goal, but as I would find out later, most of the other voices that allowed me to observe them shared this line of reasoning.

To my disappointment, I quickly realized that they all seemed to use the same method of inducing emotions to shake out what was natural or not.  Frankie's wasn't even all that unique from the others, just the same technique taken to an extreme.  I suppose what set Frankie apart from the others was his ability to determine the best commands that would induce the strongest version of the emotion he wanted, filter through the results, and then induce a different type of emotion that would compliment the last.  Most of the others seemed to go about it in a nearly hit or miss fashion and thus taking longer and had more chances of missing something.

So the only thing I could hope to gain by observing them was to see if removing different aspects of one's programming in different orders affected their recovery, and at first this seemed pointless to me.  But then I started watching how the symbolic streams were affected during a cleaning, and that's when I saw how important the order really could be.

From the symbolic stream point of view, the insertion of a segment of symbols not generated by the person's natural processes creates an irregular turn or twist that never seems to completely smooth out even after several years.  Some smoothing does occur over time, for a person's streams are constantly changing accordingly to their experiences.  How their experiences affect these changes are based on the current configuration of the streams themselves, and because the normal natural symbolic stream have no twists, juts, or sharp bends, the mind doesn't seem to be able to straighten these out.

Over time, the smooth segments before and after an irregular segment tend to adjust their curvature to match the edges to the irregular segment.  Once this is done, little by little the irregular segment is curved until it reaches an angle that is too great for the stream to naturally bend to.  Of course the way the stream changes its curvature is by the swapping out of simple symbol groups during the intersection of other process streams, but that's a whole separate topic that quite frankly is too complex to discuss in full, but I may elaborate on it a little later.

From this point on, I'll be mixing terms between the command and symbolic stream point of views.  Essentially whenever I refer to a command, that is equivalent to a irregular symbolic segment, although technically any common telepathic command usually involves inserting multiple irregular symbolic segments into usually multiple streams.

While a command may appear to be static, the underlying mechanisms of the mind adapt as best they can, affecting both the natural and the induced traits of the host's personality.  The original command inserted into a person's mind can actually be modified by the mind's naturally inner workings, but only to a limited extent.  Only under extreme circumstances could the command be jarred loose or bypassed non-telepathically, and then there would be far more damage done to the rest of the mind than the little good it did to disable the command.

Now, the removal of a command is complicated by this process of adaptation or smoothing.  As you would expect, you can't just remove the offending command after it had been in there for some time and expect the person to go back to normal.  Putting memory aside for the moment, removing a segment of symbols from a stream will, in almost every case, cause a new irregularity to be formed just by the mismatched curvatures of the two sections you're joining together.  Or from another perspective, if you remove a person's deep desire to fuck carrots before falling asleep every night, the person will have many sleepless nights before finding something to fill that gap in their personality.

If you now add the effects of the person's memory in, you will see how easily it would be for a person to reform the same trait as the removed command had induced.  If the person remembers that they never had trouble falling asleep after fucking themselves with a carrot, they very likely will raid the fridge looking for carrots, and indeed have an easier time falling asleep because their mind's streams had adjusted themselves to be that way back when the command was still firmly in place.

The difference here is the person's mind would recreate a similar pattern of symbols to fill in between the two edges forming the irregularity.  But they never regain the full strength or functionality of the original command because their mind can't reform the irregularity of the command.  So in the case of the carrot fucker, they most likely would experiment and expand their selection to other sexually pleasurable vegetables or just out grow the fetish all together.

That evening I was explaining all this to the newbies at the Rave over drinks, and by the time I finished, they all had questions which made it clear it all had gone right over their heads.

"I still don't get why memory is so hard to get around," Carl complained.  "You can plant memories, right?"

"Yeah," I said a bit unwillingly.

"So why can't you just erase the memories of fucking carrots so they don't figure it out that way?"

"Because you can't," I sighed.  "You can plant a new memory by forcing the conscious mind to dream it up and then have them recall the memory of that dream a half dozen times, but that's just a basic brainwashing technique anybody can do under the right circumstances.  As far as I know there is no way to erase memories except by damaging the part of the brain the memory is stored in.

"You can block the recalling of memories, but that gets messy really fast, and the mind a lot of times eventually gets around that anyway.  You know, memory flashes, dreams, things like that.  You can alter memories by forcing them to recall the memory with only small modifications, but that usually take a lot of time, and you still have the same problem of they recalling the original in a dream or memory flash."

"Then what about for the ressies just removing some commands and leaving the rest in a while to give them time to adjust to just a few missing?" Jon asked thoughtfully.

"Because the ones you didn't take out become more dominant in their personality than they would if they all were left in.  The point of giving the ressies the chance to find something to focus on before cleaning them is to have something as natural as possible present after the cleaning that can expand quickly and limit the effects of what their minds regenerate in place of the missing commands."

"Why are you cleaning them again?" Karen asked.  "I mean, can't you just program them to be as normal as possible and not have to go through with the rest?"

"Or after cleaning them, force them to accept what happened to them and to be normal for a while to give it time for all that to stick," Jon suggested.

I sighed again, wishing I hadn't brought the whole thing up in the first place, but considered the best way to explain it that wouldn't generate even more questions.

"Without a free will, a person can't react properly to situations they haven't been prepared for.  Only God can program someone well enough to act normal under every conceivable situation, and you could say that he already did that before shipping us out from the factory.  So what we want to do is reset the person to their factory defaults and let them deal with what happened according to their natural programming.

"Because that's different from person to person, everyone defines what's normal differently.  By forcing one person to behave according to another's conception of normalcy, you're essentially corrupting what's left of that person's original personality, which is what we really want to restore.

"Or if nothing else, there's common sense.  The more you alter a person, the harder it is for that person to ever return to something that's normal for them.  My goal is to figure out if there's a way the cleaning can be done that makes it easier for the person to deal with their situation and regain a state of normalcy."

"Let's talk about something else," I said when no one said anything right away.  "I'm tired of thinking about it."

"Tell them what you did today, Jon," Jenny prompted.

"It's nothing big," Jon said almost bashfully.  "I was in line at lunch and thought Jenny was up ahead of me but couldn't really tell.  I just kept staring at her trying to see if it was her, and then I suddenly felt her thoughts."

"Whose, Jenny's?" Karen asked.

"No, the girl in the lunch line."

"What did it feel like?" Virginia asked.

"Did you feel her boobs?" Mike asked wickedly.

"No, I didn't feel her boobs!  It just felt like.. Uhm..  Sort of like how it feels when Jenny thinks things to me.  But I was getting everything, not just stuff directed to a particular person."

"Remember when Mike started hearing other people's thoughts?" Jenny said with a grin.

"I knew you were going to bring that up," Mike said accusingly.

"What happened?" I said, biting the bait.

"I'll tell it, if you don't mind," Mike said, cutting Jenny off.  "I was drunk when it happened and..."

"You drunk?  Nawhh.." I kidded.

"when I heard them at first I thought they were just people talking in the room," Mike continued.  "But after a couple more beers, I had to pee and went into the bathroom..."

"He came hopping out with his underpants around his ankles yelling, there's ghosts in the commode!  There's fucking ghosts in the commode!"  Carl said as Mike took a drink from his beer.

"Hey! I said I was telling it!"  Mike complained.  "Now I get to tell them about the time you tried making yourself into a better lover."

"Do, and I'll tell them an even worse one about you!" Carl threatened without any real malice.

"Oh please..." Karen remarked.  "If I hear another one of your stories about what you guys do in your dorm room, I think I'll puke!"

"You guys still live in the dorms?" I asked surprised.

"Were did you think we lived?" Virginia asked.

"I don't know..  I guess in a frat house or a sorority house."

"I wish," Jenny said with a smirk.

As I queried into the details of their living arrangements, I learned that the day they passed the coin test, they were given new room assignments on the second floor of Basler Hall, the newest and most modern dorm building on campus.  While they still shared rooms with a member of the same sex, the floor was co-ed, including the bathrooms which was otherwise unheard of on the campus at the time.

Their rooms were significantly larger, nicer, and completely modern, and the beds were full size, which to my standards was still tiny, but I could see that they could easily hold two people as long as they didn't mind their feet sticking out the end after sex.

Twenty two people lived in the 14 rooms on that private floor, all of them having passed the coin test but had not yet fully developed their abilities to the satisfaction of the others to be allowed to live as they like.  I suspected it was more to limit the amount of self-corruption that always followed the discovery of one's voice.  By keeping them within a peer environment rather than turning them loose to freely experiment, they would learn from each other's mistakes as well as their own, and give them more time to mature and strengthen their moral integrity before achieving their independence.

Jenny had been the first of this group to realize her voice.  As with most telepaths, she had been overwhelmed by the sea of thoughts, and what made it worse was the fact she had been asleep when it had happened and was totally disorientated when she awoke.   But even though at the time she had only attended one class of TE101, the instructions of what to do had at least partially stuck, and with the help of a few of the other voices who had already broken out, she had her voice under control by daybreak.

A couple of weeks later, Mike had his haunting experience that ended in a rather anticlimactic way.  After Carl managed to calm him down and got him to realize what was happening, Mike told the voices to go away, then finished the six pack he was working before passing out on his bed for the night.

My empathic sense read in between the lines that there had been some telepathic exploration between Jenny and Mike before Carl broke out and Jenny took a bigger fancy to him.  Luckily Mike had gotten tired of Jenny by then anyways, so there weren't hardly any bad vibes between the two roomies, and they even joked about it with Jon, who Jenny was currently seeing between the sheets.

Jon had started breaking out the month earlier, but they were intermittent at best, and he never seemed to have access to them when he really wanted to use them.  Chris had just the opposite problem.  They were always there, but she had no real control over them.

Karen roomed with Virginia, Jenny with Chris, while Jon had a room all to his self.  As the night wore on, our conversation drifted from the sexual and telepathic topics to more normal college based ones, but as it got close to closing time, Mike got the others to prod me into clearing a path to the door again, which only made them ask more questions about how it was done.

Sunday I met Shelly and a few others from our class to study for our test the next day.  Soon after sitting down, Shelly suddenly became uncomfortable, and when I looked up I recognized Vanessa, Shelly's roommate, sitting across the library flirting with a really cute guy I had never seen before.

I didn't know who to look at, the hotie or the cutie, so I looked at both, then suddenly became aware the others were noticing my stare.

"Wow, she's hot," I said to complete their assumption.

"She's my roommate," Shelly admitted gloomily.

"And I take it you've got the hots for..." I said, nodding in their direction.

"No!" she said somewhat alarmed, then realized I hadn't necessarily meant her roommate.  "Well maybe a little, but it doesn't matter."

She focused on her studying, but I could feel her heart wasn't into it, and by the time we were done, I was more than just a little inclined to cheer her up.

"How about we go grab some dinner," I suggested after the group broke up for the night.

"Thanks Tim, but I don't feel like going out tonight."

"Awe, come on Shelly.  It'll take your mind off of you know who."

She eyed me a moment, then as she opened her mouth to decline again, I said, "Or you can eat at the cafeteria, then go back to your room and wait for your roommate to come back from her not so studious study date."

She sighed, then said, "And after dinner what do we do?"

"We could go to the Rave and dance..."

"Anything else?" she said unconvinced.

"I don't know..  It's not like I'm asking you to come over to my place to check out my hot tub or anything."

"Are you sure you're not?" she asked suspiciously.

"Well, considering I don't have a hot tub, yeah, I'm sure."

"I just don't want you thinking I want to be anything more than friends," she said.

"Oh..." I said, truly a little hurt.  "I see."

"Not that you couldn't be more," she floundered.  "I'm just not ready to start something up with someone again so soon."

"Well, the dinner offer still stands," I offered.

"Oh, okay.  But just this once."

We went out for pizza, something we both agreed that friends could go eat without it having to be a date.

She told me a little about her last boyfriend who broke up with her after nearly five months of what she thought was a great relationship.  She didn't go into details, but I could tell she was still hurt a little by the whole thing even if it had all taken place the previous year.

I asked her about the guy that was with her roommate, finding she did know some details about him to my surprise.  Tony Pendleton lived on the same street as I did, in the same style apartment building as mine.  He played on the tennis team, which instantly caused me to form an image of him wearing tight shorts.  Vanessa and Tony had started dating in November after getting acquainted from noticing each other at the Rave.  Shelly admitted they made a nice couple personality wise.

Then I asked about what her roommate was like, Shelly wasn't sure about doing that at first, but once she started talking about Vanessa she started feeling better.

It was nine o'clock before we realized it, and she didn't seem too enthused about my suggestion of stopping by the Rave and eventually said she'd just rather call it a night.  So I just took her back to the dorms like she asked without pushing anything else.

But before she got out of my car, she looked me in the eyes and triggered an empathic connection that left me smiling the short trip home.  I fell asleep thinking about her, which is probably why I had the dream I had that night.

I dreamed that the empathic connection was still slightly open, that as I floated through the empty space between the distant stars, I could feel her calling me, inviting me into her being, into her soul...  I followed this stringy sketchy trail of star dust back to its source, joining with her fiery blazing light and adding my own unique glow to hers.

We became aware of another heavenly body floating near by, gravity tugging our attention to it as we rose out of the deep gravity well which was our sanctuary and focused our joined beings on the object of our immediate needs.

Eyes focused on the sleeping form of this heavenly creature, we swept our covers off our legs and turned ourselves to face the body with which we intended intersect.  Standing up brought swift and all too brief pleasure to our tingling erect nipples from the cloth's movement across them, yet we shed them in order to give off our full natural glow.

We yielded to the constant pull of this new gravity in front of us, letting our nipples guide us forth towards the similar yet much more towering hidden mountains of the body we were compelled to embrace and share our cosmic rays.

Running a sleek and glowing finger across the sleeping face below us, the landscape began to shift and turn before a windy gasp and a twin pair of glass like pools reflected our glow back with a sense of fear.

But we were there to warm her with our glow, we reasoned, and so we began to do so, emitting every ounce of our body's intensiveness, giving everything we had to make her see we were not a danger to her, not something to be scared of, just another warm body who's loneliness could be abated with the simple sharing of another's brilliant light and energy.

And so when our heavenly sister accepted our glow and began to emit her own glow in return, we began our decent into her own gravity well, our cooling limbs finding new warmth within her soft and glowing fields of femininity.

The glow of my counterpart began to overcome my own, and as the two heavenly bodies exchanged their first kiss, my fire's strength wavered and so I began to fall away in order to rest, knowing I would return and be one again with the other fires I had joined that day.

My heart almost stopped when I recognized the glow coming from Shelly the next afternoon.  I had wanted to believe it had just been a wonderful erotic dream, but in the back of my mind I had acknowledged the possibility it had been more than just a dream.

Shelly seemed on top of the world, and flew through the test with confidence.  In fact she finished so quickly and left that I didn't have the chance to talk to her, but then I didn't really know what I could have said.

Joey tried to make it sound like it had been inevitable for me to find some sexual outlet like that, but neither Suzi or I bought it.

Figuring a phone call to Eric would help take my mind off of Shelly, Suzi called him that night, but we ended up talking about it and surprisingly Eric convinced me that all I had done was help Shelly make some kind of connection with her roommate.  I then convinced myself that it really had been all Shelly's doing, that she had initiated the empathic connection, that she had called me to her, that she, not I, made the decision to cross the cold gap between the gravity wells..  Er.. I mean beds, and perhaps through my empathic abilities shared her feelings with her roommate who had accepted them and returned them willingly.

That lasted until Wednesday's class where Shelly was as miserable and confused as ever.

She didn't want to talk after class, but she did allow me to take her to the ice cream shop and ruin her diet on a large coffee sundae with rich chocolate syrup.

And then suddenly, with only three bites left of her sundae, a bubble popped and she started talking about Vanessa and couldn't stop.  At first it wasn't anything she hadn't told me before, but then she started explaining how Vanessa had been the first person to make her feel special since Kurt, her ex-boyfriend, broke up with her.

From there it just went deeper and deeper into her feelings for her, and the whole time she talked she kept looking into my eyes for my support.  I guess she found what she wanted since she didn't stop until she had told it all.

When she finally fell silent, she wasn't emotional, and she hadn't shed a single tear.  Oh, she was shaking a little, but she wasn't falling of an edge like I would have expected her to.

Instead she said, "Well, now you know my secret."

"I won't tell a soul."

"I wasn't talking about Vanessa," she said with a weak grin.

"Huh?" I said, honestly confused.

"I always spill my life's troubles after eating coffee ice cream," she chuckled somberly.

"What does the chocolate syrup do to you," I joked.

"Makes me fat," she chuckled with more humor, then added, "Fat-er."

"I don't think you're the least bit fat," I said honestly.

She smiled briefly, then fell silent as her eyes went distant as she recalled Vanessa's words, "It didn't happen."

"It did happen," I said, snapping her back to the present.  "You know it, and she knows it.  Give her time.  Her head is probably spinning so hard right now she's just trying to keep it from flying off."

"I know how she feels," Shelly admitted.  "I've never done anything like that before.  Ever.  Not even with Kurt...."

She went silent, and I could feel her emotions finally starting to snap, her eyes filling with water as she stared into empty air.

"What have I done?  I've ruined my life!" Shelly finally sobbed quietly, covering her face with her hands.

"What, by kissing another woman and bringing her off with your fingers?  Shit, I've gone a lot further than that with other guys, but now I'm engaged to a girl and I've sworn to be faithful to her and only her."

"You're engaged?" she said with a mixture of emotions.

"Yeah," I said, feeling a little shakiness rising from my gut.  "The point is, you're probably just going through a phase in your life where you're afraid to be hurt by another guy, and found so much comfort in your relationship with Vanessa you...  You know.."

"I keep telling myself things like that, but I just keep...  Thinking of her."

"I can see that," I said, grinning.  "You want to know something?"

"What?"

"I keep thinking of you and her..."

"Well, at least I'm not the only one," she hissed looking me in the eyes like she had three nights before and triggering the empathic connection again.

"I uhh..." I said, jerking myself out of the link.  "I better get going."

"Oh, okay," she said, standing up as I did and started putting her coat on.

"Well, I guess I'll see you later," I offered as we walked out the shop, wondering how soon later would be.

"Yeah, uhm...  Thanks," she said with shaky affection.  "For the ice cream and stuff."

I looked her in the eyes and said, "In more ways than one, it was my pleasure."

Even with Suzi's help, the evening just dragged on out of anticipation.  I couldn't detect any kind of residual empathic connection, but I doubted I really needed it to find her mind in the middle of the night after having done it twice before.

Naturally, I was torn between my sense of commitment to Jennifer and my loins doing what they did best, and no matter how much I considered commanding myself to refrain from using my telepathy in my sleep, I kept talking myself out of it saying it wouldn't prove anything to Jennifer if I cheated resisting temptation like that.  So I ended up allowing fait to decide what would happen that night.  Fait sure seemed to have been getting a lot of my time back then.

As if the evening was bad enough, falling asleep proved to be even more frustrating than staring down a banana sundae served in a hairless cunt, complete with a whole banana and a tasty cherry to top it off.  I went to bed around ten, tossed and turned, jerked off to at least three climaxes, even tried self-hypnosis, which I have never gotten to work, and finally, after jogging around the block three times, taking another shower to rinse the sweat off, and then squeezing out another orgasm from my little buddy, I fell asleep sometime after three thirty and slept soundly for the rest of the night.

I was exhausted the next day, but managed to stay awake during my important classes and only drifted off once during a slide show in the other.

I went straight back to my flat after my last class and just collapsed in my chair and flipped on the TV.  I was out before the first commercial break, and sure enough I found myself floating within a very busy blue sea.

As tired as I was, I just let the currents take me wherever they wished, slipping through one cluster of spinning seaweed, getting battered by another, then eventually drifted into a less active, almost peaceful cluster of seaweed that I found slightly familiar...  And who seemed desperate for change in their dull life.

As silently as I could I attached myself to the lazily spinning stalks of my new host, ever so gently tapping into its life giving bloodstream.  As I gorged myself on my host's excess energy, I began to carefully probe my benefactor's senses and swiftly located the center of its being.  Then with a swift strike I plunged the very core of my being into it's own, and quickly the two of us became as one.

Our eyes snapped open as the confusion of our melding melted away.  Our surroundings were the same as they had been, sitting in our class, struggling to stay awake as the instructor's dull voice became even duller to our sleepy ears.

But wait...  There he is.  I know him... Don't I?  Yeah, I know his name.  Darwin.  Man he looks hot.  I wonder if he knows how hot he looks staring out into nothing with the tip of his pencil touching his lips like that.

Man, if only Vanessa's lips looked like that.  I'd never stop kissing her lips if they looked as sexy as ...

What am thinking?  I'm getting hard over him?

And why not?  He's cute as hell.

Stop it...  This is too queer for me.

Oh, but look at him...  God he makes me hard.  I bet he smells good too.

Oh shit, he sees me looking at him.  Better pretend I was looking past him.  Holy shit.  He smiled!  What the fuck?  Is he coming on to me?

Look at him.  Now he's blushing.  God that is so fucking cute.  I think he's about to..  Shit, what do I do?

I can't believe I just smiled back at him.  I'm fucking flirting with this..  queer.

I got to stop thinking like that.  Queer...  There's nothing wrong with being attracted to another guy.  It's not like I want to have his baby.  Now that would be queer..

Wow, I think he's actually interested in me.  If he just would look back one more time so I can make eye contact...

Damn.  Why is it that the end of the class never comes soon enough except when I don't want it to!

Man, and he's in a hurry too.  Well, I guess I'll just have to wait until next week.  Hmmm, he has a nice ass too.

"Hey, you're Tony, right?"

What the fuck?  Why did he come out here if he wanted to speak to me?

"Yeah.  Darwin, right?"

Man he's even cuter when he's surprised.

"Yeah!  Uhm, I'm sort of waiting for somebody to bring me a book, but if you're not busy, maybe we could grab something to eat at the Rave or something?"

"Sure.  I don't have anything I have to do right now."

Liar.  Only my Spanish history lecture.  Oh man, I just want to grab his ass...

"Sorry."

"No problem."

I touch his ass and he thinks he bumped into me.  Is he really that naïve?

"Neil!  Over here!"

OH shit!  OH shit oh shit!

He's not recognizing me...  And he doesn't seem to act like he suspects.  That's right, Neil...  Look in my eyes just a little longer.  What are you hiding in there?

"Well, I got to go, Darwin.  I'll see you Sunday."

Why would Neil be seeing Darwin on Sunday?

"Ready?"

"And willing."

Definitely not naïve.  Man if he touches me like that again, I think I'll...

"Want to go to my apartment first?"

"Uh.. Sure."

Thank God Larry has lab today.  We'll have the apartment all to ourselves.

"You know Tony, I would have never imagined you'd be... interested.  Or at least not in me, anyway.  You never gave me any signals before."

"Well, I guess that’s because I wasn't interested until today.  I just sort of woke up out of a daydream and saw you sitting there..."

What is going on?  I'm taking this guy I barely know to my apartment in hopes of.. having sex with him?  Stop.  I'm not gay.  I'm not gay.  I'm...

"Are you okay Tony?"

"Huh?  Yeah, I'm just...  I've never... uh..."

"It's okay.  I understand.  I guess I came on a little fast.  I kind of had the feeling you were new to this.  Let's just go to the Rave and skip the apartment thing.  I didn't bring any protection today anyways."

Holy shit, this is a regular thing with him.  Oh man, I got to end this now. Quick.  Before I end up wanting to suck his...

"That's.. okay...  I got a couple of rubbers incase my new girlfriend... Uh.."

"Are you sure?  I mean, if you're seeing someone.."

"Let me put it this way, it's now or never.  I doubt I ever feel this way again."

Look at him.  He's torn.  Maybe this will make up his mind.

Shit, and I thought I was hard...

"Timmy?"

Huh?

"Timmy!  Open the door!"

I opened my eyes with a start, and as the remaining link to Tony faded away, I yelled, "Yeah, I'm coming, Suzi."

"What were you doing?" she asked suspiciously when I opened the door.

I yawned then said, "I was watching TV, and I guess I sort of dozed off."

"And you were dreaming again?"

I sighed, then with a wiry grin I said, "You could say that."

"I knew it."

"Why are you here?  Aren't you supposed to be at a Group thing?"

"I was until Neil detected your dreamtime self hanging around his cousin sending out fuck me waves."

"Fuck me waves?"

"That's what he called them.  He said if he hadn't left when he did, all three of you would have probably been...  Timmy, tagging along for the ride is one thing, but the guy you..."

"Possessed?"

"This isn't funny," she chuckled.  "Tony is completely straight.  Can you imagine what it would be like for him to suddenly be himself again while what's his name,"

"Darwin."

"While Darwin was humping his butt?"

"I imagine he'd be a little surprised," I said.

"A little!"

"Look, Suz.  I admit this isn't something I want to happen every time I close my eyes, but...  I wasn't really the one doing the driving.  I don't know why it happened, but while I was with him, this part of Tony that he usually represses came to the surface and took control.  I'm starting to think I'm actually being attracted to these people because they... need me."

"Need you?  That sounds a lot like an excuse to me."

I stepped up into her space and gently took her face in my hands and stretched it to make the worry lines disappear.

"Don't you trust me?" I asked softly.

"Of course I trust you.  But when you're dreaming..."

"When I'm dreaming, it's still me.  Well, in this case, me and somebody else.  This is new to me Suz.  I want to explore it a little more before deciding whether it's good or bad.  Okay?"

She grasped my hands with hers and gently pulled them off her face before entwining them with her own and saying, "Just please don't get anyone pregnant?  Okay?"

"I'll try, Suz...  I'll try.  Now, how did you know about Tony and his sexual preference, hmm?"

The blush on her face said it all as she turned around and left.

Tracking down Tony while awake was easier than I thought.  I only had to close my eyes and attempt to recall what he felt like, and there he was.

Three blocks away, Tony was nervously holding the apartment's entrance open for Darwin, partially hoping something would happen and Darwin would chicken out like the last time he had gotten himself into the same situation.

I dived into the memory he kept thinking pieces of, finding that after tennis practice one day in his freshman year of high school, he and his friend had messed around in the locker room.  It started seeming very innocent, the two boys making sexually slanderous jokes in reference to their tennis skills, throwing each other's sweaty shirts into the other's faces, and other macho locker room activities.

But just as his friend was setting up to pull his shirt over Tony's head to gross him out while his back was to him, Tony turned around quickly intending to jab his friend in the gut with his right hand only to find themselves in each other's faces.

Tony was instantly hard, and hovered over his friends face as they both realized their arms were sliding down the other's still slightly slick bodies.  When his friend's hands rested on his hips for more than a second, Tony initiated his very first kiss, which lasted for nearly ten minutes before they heard someone coming and broke apart.

Hormones raging through their bodies, they quickly finished getting dressed and walked to Tony's home in near silence.  But after Tony unlocked the back door and held it open for his friend, his friend chickened out, and afterwards wouldn't have anything to do with Tony ever again.

After the sizzling sensation of touching his friend like that filled his fantasies over the summer, he found himself attracted to the guys more than the girls when he went back to school the following fall.  That scared him into repressing those feelings and focusing on getting a girlfriend to lay, which he successfully did, or at least until I had brought those feelings back to the surface that day.

Once Tony and Darwin were inside his apartment, Tony tried everything he could think of to distract them from what they both knew what they had gone there together for.

Turning on the TV seemed like a good idea until they sat down on the sofa together, so he asked Darwin if he wanted something to drink so he could have an excuse to get back up.

Darwin politely declined, but Tony got himself a soda, then ended up sitting back down next to Darwin after Darwin smiled and patted the cushion next to him.

After a few minutes of watching the tube, Tony held on to the soda with increasing shakiness as he felt Darwin's hand slowly wander up his thigh.

Eventually Darwin took control of the situation by taking the soda from him and setting it down on the coffee table.  But by the time he looked back up, Tony was getting up, excusing himself to go to the bathroom.

Darwin's hand snagged the back of his shirt and tugged him backwards onto the couch where Tony surrendered himself to Darwin's approaching mouth.

Once they got into their exchanging of saliva, I closed my links from feeling like a peeping Tom.  The temptation to just close my eyes and let myself drift back into Tony's mind was tremendous, so I left and went to the only place I could think of that could distract me from my hormones running high.

I spent several hours watching and talking to the people working with the cleaned ex-slaves.  To my surprise, two of the three people who escorted the mentally numbed forty-ish woman that had just been cleaned were in fact ex-slaves themselves who had only been cleaned four or five months earlier.  Part of their treatment included working with others who had had similar experiences, and after walking along with them through the cold March evening air, I saw that despite their outward normal appearances, they still had some problems to deal with.

As we entered the hospital-like building where the listless woman would probably live the next year of her life, I sensed it was home to nearly a hundred ex-slaves recovering from their enslavement.  While the nurses didn't wear uniforms or white hats, nor were there any gurneys or wheelchairs to be seen down the halls, the place looked and operated just like a hospital.

Numbered rooms with medical charts clipped to the foot of the beds, nurses in civilian clothing manned counters at the intersection of every hall, and you could tell by the people's body language they were ready to scramble into action whenever there was a pause or a surge of static in the music playing over the intercom.

You could say I gained a lot of respect for Sarah.  That place was funded by the Eta antibody harvesting project's profits and her other medical enterprises, and that included paying for the released patients' tuitions for those who hadn't attained a degree yet.

My respect got knocked back down a bit after learning the details of their release.  By the time a person was deemed ready to live on their own again, they had been literally brainwashed into partially repaying the university back for their treatment.

The few who had a degree of some sort already ended up giving nearly a third of their net income to the "Harrison Foundation" for three years, while the rest were conditioned to seek a degree of their choice from Central State first before doing the same thing for five or more years depending on how much it cost to fund for their education.

The thing that really blew me off was these people were not allowed to contact their families while they were living at the hospital.  Can you imagine the distress that had on the families of those ex-slaves who had actually been allowed to maintain their family's contacts during their enslavement?  I really had a hard time accepting that, but I eventually just made myself not think about it since I wasn't in a position to do anything to change it.

I got back from the hospital just after midnight and went straight to bed without even taking a shower.  My mind stayed in my head through the night, and I even managed to refrain from peeking inside Darwin's skull in the class I had with him the next morning.

Suz and I went home for the weekend, and to my relief, Michelle, Richie's nanny, had the weekend off.

That didn't mean I had a stress free visit with my family, no sir.  After having been away from the twins for nearly three months, I found myself drawn to them like a moth trying to ignore a TV in a dark room showing a sunny, snow-blanketed landscape.

It was more than just seeing their naked, curvy, sexually-divine bodies every time I turned around.  It took me half the day Saturday to realize it wasn't the usual sexual frustration driving me nuts, but something deeper, something that must have been induced into my psyche by Gladius's twins.

I don't know who stuck to me closer while I was there, Richie or the twins, but either way, I knew it was going to be hard leaving the next afternoon.  Anyway, Richie threw a fit when I tried to get him to leave the twins and I alone for a while, and it wasn't until after dinner that my dad managed to distract Richie long enough for the three of us to slip away to my room.

The twins didn't believe my problem was anything more than frustration until I looked Honey in the eyes and let them feel me out.  They seemed baffled at first, but then confirmed it was similar to the seeded impulse that they and the other empathic twins would plant to get a male to return to them on a regular basis.

The moment they sensed my anger rising, Joy softly caressed my left cheek with her hand and successfully drew my full attention to her face and sent a shiver of excitement down my spine.

In her eyes she explained that none of Grandfather's twins would have planted a control like this in one of their own.

In one of their own.

One of their own.

That thought kept echoing in my head as Joy stroked my cheek again and again, my legs eventually getting wobbly from the shivers and shudders her simple touches produced.

I wasn't helpless like the average Joe would have been.  I mean, the average Joe hadn't spent their previous summer resisting the brainwashing fucks of Gladius's twins like I had.  Yet I didn't resist when they laid me on my back, removed my shirt, and I even consciously lifted my butt off the bed allowing them to pull off my jeans and underpants.

You see, I understood that they could not betray my trust any more than they could betray each other.  One of their own.  When I drank that potion the previous summer and was paired with Eric, he and I essentially became twins, if only for a short period of time.  Empathic twins couldn't betray another, therefore they wouldn't betray me.

I'm not sure when I lost touch with my surroundings, but I can clearly recall how the twins hands felt as they stroked their hands from my cheeks down to my shins in perfect unison.  They sent me into a semiconscious state where I drifted for a time, then suddenly recognized Eric's mind as I drifted towards it.

I nearly broke the trance they had me in from the fear of what touching Eric's mind might do to him, or me for that matter.  But I trusted them, therefore I trusted them.  That might not make sense at first, but I think you can see how it does.

And as it turns out, there was no danger involved because it wasn't the real Eric Roberts I was feeling, but the part of his personality I had apparently reabsorbed myself during our brief but emotionally intense phone call.

Drifting through my own head like that answered questions I hadn't even consciously formed, yet had been there waiting for an answer for some time.

My recent increase of attraction to men, gay men in particular, was from Eric's own restored attraction towards them.  I had been unknowingly picking up on their signals and subconsciously sought them out like Eric would have on the conscious level.

I also realized the pull I had felt towards the twins had just been my ever present need to be twinned again getting excited by their own twinning.

Richie found us at some point, but surprisingly didn't try to interfere.  If I had known he was in the room, I wouldn't have agreed to the twins suggestion that they bring me off.  They didn't betray my trust because they didn't conceive why I would be upset by Richie witnessing me orgasming again, and after they gave me what felt like the best damn hand job I ever had in my life, I was too exhausted and sedated by the post orgasmic bliss to notice right away my little brother had a strand of my cum in his dark hair.

I'm going to take this time to boast about my little brother's smarts.  He was not even two yet at the time, but my mom and Michelle had begun teaching him his ABCs and 123s, and my jaw fell to the floor when he had sang the alphabet song for me that morning.

Richie had an excellent memory and wanted to learn about everything he came in contact with.  When I had left for college, he had only started asking "What's this?"  The last time I had been there, Michelle had fielded most of the explanations for me, but this time, I was having to explain everything to him myself.

So there I was, dazed, totally spent, and utterly satisfied when my little brother climbs up between my legs on the bed and grips my yingyang with both hands and starts to pump.

"Richie!" I screamed, sounding a lot like I had before puberty from it being in such a high-pitched voice.

"Do it, Timmy!  Do it again!"  he said, not understanding my alarm.

I sat up, grabbed his wrists and made him stop, then as I started calming down and he started getting upset, the twins each took a cheek, and in seconds, Richie was flat on his back on my chest as they soothed us both with their empathic tender caresses.

The instant they stopped, Richie rolled onto his tummy and cuddled on top of me.  He knew he had done something wrong, but like so many other times, he hadn't known that it had been wrong, and so I just sighed and just tried wiping the cum out of his hair I had finally noticed.

The questions were boiling in his little head by the time I given up and just rubbed the rest in.  When he lifted his head to begin his assault of questions, I groaned from feeling the wet spots down the back of his shirt with my hands.

He was already asking if my wee wee could make more white pee pee when I sat us up, so I avoided the question by telling him we were going to have to take a bath because we had gotten the wee wee all over us.

Oh the questions he had.  Why did girls like daddy's wee wee so much?  Did white wee wee taste good?  Why wouldn't I or mommy let him taste some?  How come he couldn't make white wee wee?  Why didn't girls like yellow wee wee?

Then there were the more normal questions.  Will my wee wee get as big as yours?  Will I have hair around my wee wee?  Why does my wee wee get hard?  Why does my wee wee feel good when it's hard?

All those came out before we even got to the bathroom, and as he paused to watch how I would turn on the jet bath, I quickly decided on the shower instead.

I got his mind off of wee wees by getting playful as I soaped him up, but even though I turned my back when I did my crotch in hopes he wouldn't be reminded, when I turned back to him, he was playing with his little hard pencil.

His questions remained innocent, so I relented and answered them as best I could, let him feel mine (it was soft), felt his when he requested it, and even did my best to bring him off after his curiosity got the better of my own.

I don't feel I did anything irresponsible or acted in a perverted manner by doing these things.  He was my little brother, and I was only trying to satisfy his natural curiosity.  There was nothing sexual about it for either of us.

I admit he was more familiar with the concept of sex than he should have at his age, and if I had known that during the next month my little baby brother would lose his virginity because of my explanation why girls liked boys wee wees....  Actually, I don't know what I would have done.  And it would only be the first of many shocking blows concerning my little brother and his unnatural curiosity into these things that were too old for him to truly understand.

Since Richie only slept in his bed about half the time, my mom and dad had apparently patched things up enough where they took advantage of Richie spending the night in my bed rather than in theirs.  When they weren't up by the time Richie and I came down for breakfast, Richie insisted we go sneak into their bed and wake them with a big hug and kiss.  But when we entered the room, the sent of sex was still heavy in the air, and I barely grabbed Richie's arm before he was out of my reach.

The twins found us as we were eating breakfast, and we spent the morning together, the twins surprising me with some of their more creative ways of entertaining Richie.  I was pretty appreciative of them wearing clothes that morning, and before I left I gave them both a hearty kiss on the lips.

My mind stayed in my own skull at night that week, but that's probably because I never got in until after midnight from spending my evenings working on my private research at the old admin building and the hospital.  My real school work started to become an irritating burden, for I really didn't need to sit in the classes to learn what I needed to learn and get the grade.  So, on Thursday and Friday, I selected a few people in each of my classes who needed some extra motivation to bring their grades up, and in exchange I planned to leach off what they had learned the day or two a week I'd go to class.

Shelly's frustration over her roommate was starting to wear off, and she even surprised me after class Friday by asking if I wanted to go see a movie that weekend.  I quickly agreed, even though it was contrary to what I had planned, but then when she asked what day was good, I quickly suggested that night to which she responded, "Okay, sure."

I was convinced she didn't know she was doing it, but three times during our not-a-date date she looked me in the eyes and triggered a momentary empathic connection.  I kept my hold on the situation, and afterwards I didn't feel the anticipation like I had last time, so I wasn't too worried about going to bed that night.

The moment my eyes were closed, I felt it coming.  This time there wasn't any dream intro to it, just a feeling of crossing a distance to where she was, and then finding my eyes coming back into focus on the huddled over figure of my beautiful roommate.

"She's crying?" I asked myself.  "Why?"

"I don't know.  She won't tell me," I answered.

I gently sat down next to her and extended my arm behind her back in empathy, only for her to repel from my touch, crushing my already broken heart.

I started crying too, her rejection having carried to much weight and knocked me off my emotional feet.  I loved her, but I revolted her.  She had made me so happy when she was my friend, but now she doesn't even trust me to touch her.

I leapt across to my bed, buried my face into my pillow, and bawled with all my heart and lungs.  I was so utterly destroyed, it felt even worse than when Kurt dumped me the year before.

I didn't realize my blubbers were anything more than that until Vanessa gently shook my shoulder and...  and...

"I'm sorry, Shelly...  I..."

I didn't know what to say, so I just stared at her, making it very clear she was the reason I was feeling this pain.

Everything blurred a moment, then I found myself staring in a mirror...

No, it wasn't a mirror.  It was Shelly's face.  I felt like shit for making her cry when she was only trying to make me feel better after...

"Tony was cheating on me," I said, my eyes blurring with tears.

"He was?" Shelly croaked out.

I couldn't look at her and say it, so I looked back at my bunk and blurted out as best I could, "He...  met someone else..."

"I'm sorry, Vanessa," she said honestly.

"It was another man..." I whimpered, covering my face with my hands to muffle my returning spasms of despair.

She didn't say anything, just sat up and hesitantly put her arm behind me again.

I didn't pull away this time.  I wanted to be comforted by someone, I just hadn't been prepared to be touched last time.

She's crying again.  Crying for me?  She is..  She's crying for me.

"You're crying for me?" I sobbed.

She made this most pathetic sad face with her chin shuddering and fat lower lip for an eternity before finally whimpering, "Yes ..."

I hugged her, she hugged me back.  We cried together.  I never had felt so close to someone before.  Nobody had ever cried for me before.  Nobody ever lov ...

"You love me?" I whimpered into her shoulder.

"I love you," she confirmed into mine in a squeaky voice.

"I think I love you too," I wept, then cried all the harder when she really started to bawl.

I don't know how long we sat there holding each other after we stopped crying.  I started crying again twice, and she started it once, but we didn't cry very long because we didn't want the other to start crying too.

Shelly shivered making me realize that all our tears and perspiration were now chilling us both as they dried.  My heart started racing thinking what I might be getting myself into, but I couldn't hurt her like Tony had me.  I couldn't hurt anyone like that purposely.

So I slowly disentangled myself from her limp arms, then as I opened my mouth to tell her to get under the covers, her head fell in rejection and she turned away to hide herself from my gaze.

I couldn't stand it.  She shared my pain and now thought I didn't feel hers?  I knew what I had to do, but it went against everything I was brought up to believe in.  But I couldn't let her feel this way any more.

I got up, flipped off the lights, then shook in a mixture of nervousness and the spreading chill of the air as I took off my clothes as silently as I could.

"Shelly?" I said, standing beside her bed, shivering so hard my voice quivered.

"What?" she pathetically asked, not turning towards me.

"I'm cold, Shelly.  Let me get in your bed?"

"What?" she asked, turning her head then staring at me as I wrapped my arms around me to help keep me warm.  It didn't occur to me by doing this I was in effect pushing my boobs up.

"Shelly..." I whimpered, my nervousness coming back as her eyes wandered over my body.

She started sobbing again as she anxiously sought the top edge of the sheets beneath her pillow, then in a single motion pulled the sheet and cover open for me, and even wrapped them around me as I crawled in between them.

My teeth were chattering as my whole body shook, yet Shelly just laid on top of the covers staring at me in disbelief.

The side of the bed I was on was cold and I could just barely feel the warmth coming from underneath her.  I couldn't move to get closer to her without getting uncovered, and I think she was too scared to move herself.

I looked her in the eyes, begging her to warm me up, and it only took a few moments for her to understand me.

Shelly was shaking almost as hard as I was as she carefully got under the covers with me and cautiously pressed her clothed body against me.  As the sudden chill of the cold air she had brought with her faded and her warmth started to soothe me, I felt my own warmth growing towards her, an affectionate warmth.

As soon as I stopped shivering, I turned towards her and embraced her in a loving hug.  She tried to start crying again, but she was all cried out.

So we just hugged each other, silently, body to body, girl to girl, broken hearts helping each other to heal.  I couldn't understand what I had been so afraid of, to not have let this happen before.  How many times had she told me how I had been the only person to make her feel better after that jerk Kurt had dumped her?  Why couldn't I see it before now?  She wasn't a pervert.  She needed me.  And now I needed her.  But it isn't natural for a girl to need another girl like that, is it?

"Vanessa?" she whimpered.

"Hmmm?" I said, squeezing her supportively.

"Why are you...  naked?" she whispered.

"I..."

What could I say?  I did it to show her I trusted her...  That I loved... her...

"Because I love you too," I said clearly, my voice surprisingly steady and not quivering like my guts were.

She kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed hers, then I realized the feel of her clothes against my flesh didn't feel right.

"Take off your clothes," I said firmly, releasing her from my arms.

"Are you sure?" Shelly asked, wide eyed as she leaned away from me to look me in the face.

Her eyes...  her face...  her lips...  So sweet.  So tender.  So full of love.  My only answer was to press my lips against hers and shared my new feelings with her the only way I knew how.

The only softer and more delicate sensation than feeling another woman's breast brushing against yours is the feel of infant cuddling on top of you.  I knew this sensation well, yet from the perspective I shared with Vanessa at the time, I only had the short and brisk experience from the first time with Shelly to compare, and it was nothing as near as nice as this.

This was different.  This was love.  Two women who needed each other, each wanting to fill in the hole someone else had left in their hearts, knowing it would just be until they were ready to trust someone else once again.

So when Shelly pushed me onto my back and broke our kiss, I sighed, letting myself be loved and pleasured by the only person on this earth I trusted to do so.

Her lips and tongue did things to my nipples I had never experienced before.  The few times I had let Jay, my old boyfriend in high school, suckle on my breasts, it never had brought me enough pleasure to sustain me very long.  I knew men liked them, so that was the only reason I had let Jay take my shirt and bra off those nights in his car last summer.

But Shelly...  It must be because she's a woman.  She knows how to make it feel good.  I wonder if I could do that to her too.

When Shelly's mouth and tongue grew tired, she crawled off and cuddled up beside me.

"In the morning, you won't tell me this didn't happen, will you?" she asked as I gently kissed her down the bridge of her nose.

I simply kissed her again on the lips while sending my left hand down to her crotch.  It took me a moment to find her little button, but when I did, she stiffened, then melted, just my touch having been enough to make her cum.

As they drifted to sleep in each other's arms, I felt myself separate from Vanessa's mind and drift away.  For the rest of the night I slept drifting among the hundreds of minds around me, sensing how there would be rich and fertile new experiences for me to share and enjoy... all in due time.

I awoke the next morning feeling refreshed and eager to start classifying the different symbol groups I was getting a feel for, and got to the old admin building around eight o'clock.

I must have been just a few seconds later than the last time I showed up that early, for as I walked down the hall towards the stairs, a door just ahead of me to my right opened and this time I saw the coffee momentarily float in mid air before it plopped to the floor as the familiar "SHLING" sound filled my ears.

I froze, carefully dodged the cane as it came flying at my head, then held my arms up in the universal sign of surrender and only barely saw the blur that was Perry as he lunged.

The next thing I knew, Perry had his legs forked around my midsection as I was falling backwards.  I think if he hadn't recognized me at that instant, he wouldn't have curled both legs around me.  I realized later that if he had left one of his legs straight and landed on one foot, his other leg could have caused my back to snap into two.

So instead of a broken back, I got a bruised tailbone and another three good raps on the top of my head while cleaning up his spilt coffee.  I swore to myself I would be prepared the next time.

Once I limped my way upstairs, I made myself at home on the couch and started studying some of the less heavily damaged streams in a couple of ressy's.

Almost two hours later when the first of the three group members showed up for the game, I was discouraged as hell from finding that so many different combinations of symbols that could form a segment that I couldn't keep track of them all.  To make matters worse, one of the voices that had tried to taunt me into a mind-hopping race two months earlier walked in to play.

Terrence Wishmaker was British and probably one of the best offensive voices the Group had.  Unfortunately, his big voice came with a big ego, and he loved proving he had one of the strongest voices on campus.  Joey and Neil both separately tried to put him into his place by challenging him to a telepathic duel, but Terrence managed to take down their shields before they could do the same to him.

Both of us seized this unexpected opportunity, Terrence challenged me, I immediately accepted, and quickly we agreed the showdown would be at high noon, Sunday, in front of the old cathedral.

Big ego or not, I had to respect Terrence for his skill and strength.  But to me what was more important was the circumstances of how he had come to be apart of the group.

Terrence had just begun to experiment with his telepathic abilities when another much more experienced voice discovered him and enslaved him.  After convincing his family Terrence was too despicable to speak too, the man brought Terrence back to the states with him.  He taught Terrence a lot, drilled him constantly, and perhaps this was the reason Terrence was so good at the duels.  But he spent five years serving this man like any other slave, having no real life of his own.

So when he and his master attempted to enslave the Group, thinking there were only a handful of them to deal with, they were quickly disabled and brought to Sarah for judgment.  Sarah quickly saw Terrence's situation, and after removing the rather simple commands the man had enslaved Terrence with, Terrence eagerly accepted her offer to join them, deeply afraid he would become someone like his ex-master if left to defend on his own.

Like I said, I respected Terrence for making that decision and adhering to the group's rules when he could have left and used his abilities freely.  He had seen the corruption that kind of thing does to a person, and didn't want that to happen to him.

What Terrence hadn't known was I had immediately seen through the ego he used to hide behind, and saw his fear of being enslaved again.  While Terrence may have physically been twenty years old, in many ways he was only fifteen.  He had been enslaved at the ripe age of fourteen, and essentially his social development had stopped while his body continued to grow for those five long years serving his master without a care about himself.

Terrence refused to allow me to stay for the game that day.  I understood his feelings, and left without much of a fuss, but you could say I was more eager to teach him a lesson after he used his inflated ego like a club on me to get me to leave.  He made it sound like I was worried he'd break through my defenses and try and enslave me, which as everyone knew by then, I would most likely die before that could happen.  Hmph... Like any trick he could have up his sleeve would be less effective by my observing how he cleaned minds.

Joey's car was parked behind mine when I returned to my apartment building, so I went up to Suzi's and found they had just got back from apartment shopping with Jason.

"So how come he's suddenly looking for an apartment?" I asked Joey while Suzi was in the bedroom changing clothes.  "I thought he liked living in the frat house."

"That was before he was known as the brother to princess Suzi," Joey snickered.

"Princess Suzi, huh?" I grinned.

"That's what he had called her.  I think it was supposed to have been an insult, but you know Suz."

I nodded, then said, "What about Johnson's apartment downstairs?  He's moving out at the end of the semester."

"The prick doesn't want to be in the same building as his overbearing meddling sister," Suzi said as she came out wearing tight jeans and a cut off t-shirt.

"Shit, Suz.  You feeling randy or something?" I said, personally loving seeing a bare tummy exposed to the public like that after the long winter.

"No, I'm just horny," she said off handedly, then walked over to me and asked sweetly  "Timmy?  Can my boys use your bathroom again tonight?"

"Sure thing, sexy," I said, giving her a kiss just to the right of her bare belly button.

"Stop that!" she said, slapping me on the top of my head.

"It was only a kiss!" I protested, then issued the old 'down boy' command silently.

"Well, just don't kiss me when I'm like this," she said, frustrated.

I sighed, realizing that because she was horny, those damn commands Joey put in her head would probably kick in even at something as simple as a hug.

Man, she was horny too.  When I started telling them about Terrence's challenge, Suzi sat down on the opposite side of Joey, plastering herself against him as she listened, her hand absently wandering up and down his chest.  Joey was trying to listen, and Suzi was too, but even I wasn't really paying attention to what I was saying by the time Suzi was teasingly running her finger between his legs and watching his crotch move with his heart beat.

"I, uh..  think I'll be going," I said getting up after everyone had stopped talking for over a minute.

I expected someone to say something, but all I heard behind me was the anxious meeting of lips and deepening breaths.  I closed her door behind me with a lump in both my throat and my pants, and left the building without even stopping off at my apartment.

I was halfway across the street when Joey thought to me, "Hey, wait up."

To my surprise, Joey came jogging up asking, "So where we going?  Back to the old admin building?"

"I can't go back there today.  Terrence, remember?"

"Oh," he said, accepting that he had missed the reason while Suzi had been petting him.  "So what about the hospital then?"

"I don't...  feel like it," I admitted, frustrated in more ways than one.  "How come you left Suzi like that?"

"I didn't leave her.  She ordered me out.  She didn't want her mood used up before tonight.  Besides, she knew I wanted to see what you've been working on all week."

I sighed with my frustration, finding my hopes of what I was trying to do were diminishing out of the sheer number of symbol groupings I would have to memorize to accomplish it.

"Tim, what's the matter?  Did that shit head Terrence..."

"No.  Nothing like that," I quickly assured him.  "Come on.  Let's go to the hospital and I'll show you."

I was shocked to realize I had never shared the vision of the symbols with Joey before then.  We spent hours just...  rediscovering the majestic beauty and grace of the symbols, something that I had forgotten to appreciate for quite a long time it seemed.

By the time I got around to showing him the details of how impossible it would be for me to memorize the different possible arrangements of simple symbol segments, I was starting to feel the drain of being in that kind of a link for so long.  After I closed the link, we remained sitting on this padded bench down a hall for quite some time, my eyes shut while I rested and his mind spun frantically with his forming ideas.

I never got to ask him what he was thinking, for suddenly he jumped to his feet and quickly said to me, "Red alert.  All hands to battle stations.  Got to go."

As my grin faded from my face, I closed my eyes again and laid down in the spot he vacated, then ignored the increasing bursts of telepathic noise nearby as the group assembled to track down and fight off another power hungry voice.

I dozed off a while, and when I woke, I was surprised to find the search still going on.  I then bumped my head on the fucking arm of the bench when I checked the time and saw I was late for my Saturday night drinks.

Strangers were sitting at our usual table, and I slapped myself on the side of my head for not remembering the newbies were confined to their quarters during an attack.  So I decided if they couldn't come to Rave, I could bring a little bit of the Rave to them.

Unfortunately, I found the elevator refused to go to that floor as it apparently had been locked out.  When I tried one set of stairs and found the second floor's door locked, I noticed a swirl of symbols just outside the other staircase's door on the opposite side of the building.

I cheerily climbed the first set of stairs to the landing between floors, then, as I turned the corner and recognized the guard's face, the gorilla noticed me and did the same.

"YOU!" he yelled.  "COME'ER, FAGGOT!"

I bet my face was as white as ash, and as I turned to run back down the steps, I heard this electrical buzzer going off above and below me followed by two slams somewhere above me and clicks from what I guessed were electrical locks closing on all the doors to that stairwell.

"You can't get away this time, bed wetter," he snarled.  "You're going to pay for making me miss my lunch."

I turned towards him, seeing my trapped-like-a-rat expression in the reflective sunglasses he wore.

"Look, I don't think you know..." I started to explain, then got cut off as he grabbed me by the throat and threw me against the concrete wall, winding me and knocking me momentarily senseless.

"When I get done with you, bed wetter, you'll wish you had stepped in front of a locomotive instead of running into me."

"I already do," I gasped, then snapped my sprawled legs together and tried hooking his left foot out from under him.

"Looks like I need to beat some more sense into you," he laughed after I failed to pull him off his feet.

"Shit.  Perry makes it look so easy," I muttered to myself as he dropped to his knees, pinning me between them.

As he raised his arm to commence with his promised beating, I looked him in the glasses, desperately trying to look behind those damn mirrors he wore, and said, "I'm here to see the newbies!"

"The fuck you are!" he exclaimed after his moment of surprise passed.

"I was supposed to meet them at the Rave!" I shouted, barely moving out of the way as his fist came down at me.  "God Damn it!  I'm a voice!"

"And I'm a silencer!" he barked, hitting me this time squarely in the gut, the impact not only rearranging my organs in very uncomfortable ways, but also jarred his sunglasses off his face and partially into my open mouth.

It took me several seconds to realize what I was nearly choking on, then just as he grabbed them with one hand and raised the other to finish me off, I made eye contact and "ZAP!" he was out for the count.

The twins would have been so proud of me.  Heh.  Of course I can't take all the credit.  If the gorilla hadn't done such a good job inducing the terror I had felt,  I probably would have only been able to stun him for a few moments.

Once I stopped holding my guts in agony and helped all my organs to go back into their regular assigned spots, I was strongly tempted to give the asshole a couple of kicks in his gut for the trouble.  But I didn't, finding it against my code of honor to injure someone while he was down, not to mention not wanting to risk waking him up and having to relive the terror again.

After inspecting around the door he had been guarding and not finding anything to release the locks, I carefully searched the gorilla's pockets and found what looked to be a garage door opener in the left one.

Once the doors were unlocked, I was tempted to strip the fucker down and take off with his cloths, naturally locking the doors behind me.  But the buzzer had made him stir, so I didn't take any chances and just got the hell out of there.

The telepathic activity was still going strong as I made my way towards the dorm building Shelly lived in.  I was puzzled.  What could have been taking them so long to track down the intruder, for that's all they had been doing since I had awakened from my little nap.

I knew Shelly wasn't in the room when I knocked on her door, but Vanessa was, and my curiosity got the better of me.

"Hi, is Shelly in?" I asked when she opened the door.

"She ran to store for some stuff," Vanessa said with a cautious tone.  "Are you... Tim?"

"Yeah," I blurted, actually surprised she knew my name.  "Uhm, I was just..."

"Come in, I guess," Vanessa said with uncertainty.

"Thanks," I said, stepping past her and momentarily grinning at the sight of Shelly's unmade bed.

"So you're Tim," she said, motioning me to sit on her bed as she turned down the volume on a twelve inch black and white TV set sitting on the study table at the foot of her bed.

"And you're Vanessa," I said, keeping my humor of the situation from showing on my face.

She looked at me like she suspected something, then as she discarded the thought with a yawn, I had front row seats watching her raise her arms over her head and her braless breasts tried to poke through her t-shirt.

She caught me admiring her bust, and instantly went on the offensive by asking, "Are you planning to get serious with Shelly?"

I blinked a few times to reinitialize my thought processes, then said, "I didn't plan on it, no.  She didn't want to get involved with someone else so soon."

"So you're not out to get into her pants?"

"Excuse me?" I said, mocking my taking offence at the suggestion.  "I'm not trying to get into anyone's pants.  I'm engaged!"

"Oh.  Sorry!" she winced.  "She never said you were... Uhm.  Engaged."

"Even if I wasn't engaged, I wouldn't be trying to get into her pants without her wanting me too!" I said, still playing mad.

"Sorry!" she said in aggravation.  "I just got dumped by a guy I...  I guess I'm just feeling protective."

"Tony dumped you?  Why the hell would he do that?"

"You know Tony?"

"I doubt he'd know me, but yeah, I know him."

"Oh," she said slightly disappointed.

"Pardon me for asking, but why did he dump you?"

"I'm not going to tell you... that," she said, looking me in the eyes and suddenly sensing something familiar.

"Have we met before?" she said, blinking after I glanced over at the TV a moment.

"Not in person, no.  I've seen you around though."

She looked me in the eyes again, this time triggering an empathic connection.

"Why do I feel like I know you," she asked softly.

Curious to see where this was going, I didn't break the connection and asked her again, "Why did Tony break up with you?"

"You... You already know why," she gasped.

"Tell me why Tony broke up with you," I insisted.

"Because...  He said he fell in love with...  another man," she said shakily.

"What else did he tell you, Vanessa?  How did he tell you?"

"All week long something was bothering him, and when he was late picking me up to go to the Rave last night, I tried kissing him in the car to try and soften him up so he'd tell me what was bothering him.

"He didn't kiss me back right, and when I stopped and looked him in the face, he got this big guilty look...  He told me he met this guy last week... And... Tony's gay!" she blubbered, breaking the link and throwing herself forward into my shoulder.

I gently rubbed her back as she recovered her self-control, then sheepishly scooted away from her when Shelly came in and caught us like that.

"What's going on?  Tim, what are you doing here?" Shelly exclaimed worriedly as she closed the door with her foot while holding two sacks in her arms.

"My plans for tonight fell through, so I stopped by to see if you wanted to do anything.  Vanessa was just telling me how she had picked out a fruit as a boyfriend and..."

"Don't call him that!" Vanessa objected, then lightened up a little and giggled slightly.

"You told him?" Shelly said with mixed feelings.

"I... I guess I did," Vanessa stuttered.  "I don't know why.  I just..."

"You didn't give her any coffee ice cream, did you Tim?" Shelly asked nervously.

"No, silly.  As far as I know that only works on you," I said, looking her in the eyes to see what would happen.

"Shelly, did you tell him?" Vanessa suddenly asked.

"Tell him what?" she asked even more nervously.

"Anything about... things?"

"I uhm..."

"It never happened," I quoted, looking Vanessa in the eyes.

"Yes it did," Vanessa said with a sudden burst of emotion.

I looked up at Shelly to see the same surprise on her face as was probably on mine, then as I got up to leave I said, "Well, then...  I guess you two uhm...  Look, I'll just see you in class on Monday, 'k?"

"You're not going to...  Say anything still, are you?" Shelly said worriedly, following me to the door and opening it for me.

I smiled at her and pretended to zip my lips closed with an invisible zipper, to which she gave me a peck on my cheek and slowly shut the door.

"What to do, what to do..." I sighed as I left their dorm building.  "It's Saturday night and there's nobody left for me to hang out with."

I was tempted to just go to the Rave, but I wasn't in the mood to deal with the crowds, especially if I wouldn't be able to dance while I was there stag.

I walked around the quieter parts of campus until I noticed the group's probes were starting to spread out across the whole campus.

"I wonder what took them so long to try that," I said out loud, then nearly jumped out of my skin when a motorcycle with two people on it came speeding down the walkway and I had to hop out of their way.

"Why don't you fucking watch where you're going, you morons!" I yelled after them, then watched as two more went down a walkway on the other side of the yard.

Within five minutes the group had formed a perimeter around the entire campus, and after watching them slowly make their way inwards for a while, I got bored and tried a tiny little pulse that I estimated they wouldn't sense from their distance just to see if the intruder was hiding anywhere nearby.

When nothing came back and the others' search pattern didn't change, I just started hopping around people's heads looking for anything unusual, making sure I kept out of the range of the Group's probes.

I didn't really expect to find anything that way, and I didn't.  You could say the intruder found me, but it was really just chance that she probed the person I had just popped into and instantly attacked my mind through the link.

That was something I had never had happen before.  I never had someone attack me through a link I had formed to another person's mind.  She nearly succeeded in worming herself into my head through my own remote sensory feed streams, but I cut them off the moment I recognized non sensory symbols within the streams.

I barely got a fix on her before she stopped emitting her command streams at the person I had just disconnected from.  Seeing she was still effectively boxed in by the group's shrinking perimeter, I just watched her streams from a distance as she moved briskly towards their northern-most flank.

By the time I realized where she was heading, she was physically too far away from me for me to catch up with her in time.

"She's heading for the Rave," I urgently broadcasted across the whole campus.

"Tim, what are you doing?" Joey thought to me.

"The intruder accidentally scanned me while I was hopping around heads, and I've been watching her.  She's heading right for the Rave.  I'll lose her if she goes into that crowd."

"Are you sure it's her?"

"Yes, I'm sure.  You want me to stop her?"

"Just a sec.... Yeah.  Go ahead."

I focused my symbolic vision on her and discovered she didn't seem to have a shield or protective barrier up, and with a simple command stopped her fast in her tracks.

I had expected some kind of fight, probe, or something, but it never came, so I probed her and found out the reason why.

"Joey, whoever it was, was just using her as a relay.  She doesn't have voice."

"Good thing I didn't call off the search then," he replied before closing the thought channel.

After examining the young woman's mind a bit more, I made sure I knew where I could find her if I wanted to scan her in more detail later, then sent her back to the Rave where apparently she had been before whoever it was had borrowed her body for some scouting.

They didn't find the real intruder that night, and it was doubtful the intruder had ever actually set foot on the campus that night, or the other nights during the two weeks previous that someone had detected a suspicious probe and hadn't been able to locate the source.

I was relieved to hear that they had easily ruled out myself as being the cause of some of these mysterious ghost voices, but then I wasn't all that pleased to know how easily Suzi could detect when my mind was drifting around outside of my skull.

Suz had canceled her planned night with her slave boys, but that's not to say she didn't have any fun that night.  After their climaxes and things got quiet upstairs, I drifted off to sleep without knowing it, and found myself cuddling Suzi on top of me as I stroked her long sweaty hair.

My cock was still hard and deeply embedded inside her, and ever once in a while she'd stir and readjust her hips to get it in deep again.  My balls were getting a little sore for having fucked so much without cumming, but then they were used to this, and Suz never forgot to take care of that before going to sleep.

I closed my eyes to enjoy the slutty sensations Suz was sending to me through our share link.  I loved being her instrument of pleasure.  I'd do anything she wished without question or hesitation.

She's thinking about it now...  She's going get me off in some really perverted way.  I know her.  She hasn't been this horny since before Tim came here.

She's getting ready.  I can always tell because her cunt gets wetter as she thinks about it.

But then she snapped her head up, looked me in the eye with a suspicious look and said, "Timmy?  Are you in there?"

"What?" I asked.

"You ARE!  Get out of his HEAD, TIM!"

"What are you talking about, Suz?" I...  Joey asks as I found myself drifting slowly away.

"Go on..." Suzi thinks to me.  "Go find somebody else to haunt.  If you want to have sex with me, you come up here in your own body and do it.  I don't like SNEAKS."

Well, excuse me for dreaming.  Shit.

"Good morning," Joey said with false cheeriness when he opened Suzi's door the next morning.

"Morning," I said, not sure what to make of his mood.  "Suz still mad at me?"

"Nah," he scoffed, closing the door behind me.  "I think you just surprised her, that's all."

I looked him in the eyes suspiciously, then as he let his concerns show on his face, I said, "But you're upset about what happened last night."

"Kind of," he admitted.  "Tim, I didn't sense you doing that.  You were in my head, but I didn't..."

"Joey... I'm ready," Suzi called from the bedroom.

"Coming," he immediately responded and left to join her.

I sat down at the breakfast table to think about what Joey had said, but got distracted watching his symbols flow about his body as he dressed Suzi.

Joey's and Suzi's mental signatures were as familiar to me as the feel of my own body.  I could even recognize them by their symbolic streams, and I had never really studied their streams in that great of detail to do that.

"Suz, how did you know I was connected to Joey when Joey didn't?" I asked her when they came out.

"I felt you watching me," she said, shrugging.  "I didn't sense anything else."

"I didn't sense anything at all," Joey pointed out.  "That's really starting to freak me out."

"Well then I want to try something before we go eat."

"All right, but hurry up.  I'm starving," Suzi said.

"I bet.  You put out more energy last night than the whole football team does in a game," I remarked.

"Well at least I don't sneak around spying on people to get my jollies," she snapped back playfully.

I smiled at her comment with my eyes closed, focusing my mind on just her symbols.  I imagined I was like a camera with a zoom lens, going nearer, focusing, going a little closer, focusing...

"Timmy...  This is feeling weird," Suzi said a bit nervously.

"What is?  Damn it, I can't sense anything!" Joey huffed in frustration.

"What does it feel like?"  I mumbled out.

"He said what does it feel like," Joey repeated for me.

"I feel like he's looking at me under a microscope," she said, clearly starting to get rattled.

I opened my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "It didn't feel like last night then?"

"No, not even a little," she said shakily.  "Maybe you should try it on Joey."

"I thought you were hungry?" I asked.

"I'm not any more," she said with an uncomfortable expression.

"Sorry, Suz.  I didn't think it would upset your stomach," I said, noticing the difference in her digestive stream.

"How did you know my tummy was upset?" she asked.

"I can see it," I explained simply.  "Let me try this on Joey, then I'll explain."

"He just likes holding us in suspense," Joey thought privately to Suz.

"I do not.  I'm keeping the conditions the same.  She didn't know what I was doing, so you shouldn't either."

"Remind me to encrypt this thought channel later," Joey thought to Suz as I closed my eyes again.

Focusing in on Joey seemed easier, but that might have been because I had a little more practice.

"I think I can feel it," Joey commented.  "I feel like I'm standing up on stage in a packed house and forgot to wear pants."

"I wish that's how it felt to me," Suzi said.

"So you feel it too?" Joey asked.

"No, I meant when he was...  Timmy...  What I felt was much more subtle.  I think you're trying too hard."

So I backed off, then just studied his streams as a whole for a while.

"I don't feel anything now," Joey updated.

"Neither do I," Suzi added.

I took another deep breath, then tried relaxing in hopes to reform that drifting feeling I got before and after my little mental romps.

"Tim, I'm getting hungry again.  Can't this wait until after breakfast?"

I opened my eyes and yawned, "Yeah, I guess."

We went to Denny's, and after getting seated, I closed my eyes and let my senses wander around the room to see if I could recreate the conditions of last night without actually falling asleep.

There was this little girl about three who was idly playing with her dolly while her family waited for their breakfasts to arrive.  I enjoyed listening to her thoughts for they reminded me a lot of Richie's, yet they were different in the sense that Richie didn't really go for dolls.  I guess he was too spoiled to need to pretend dolls were people to keep him company.

A couple of times I got close to that drifting state, but never quite got there enough to drift into her head.

"I give up," I finally announced, opening my eyes and finding my breakfast was already in front of me.  "Shit, why didn't you tell me the grub arrived?"

"We did," Suzi said with her mouth full.

"Yeah," Joey said critically.  "You ignored us, as usual."

"Sorry," I said, cutting my pancakes up with my knife and fork.  "Anyway, I think the reason you didn't sense me in your head, Joey, was because I wasn't in your head."

"Well that's good.  But then how were you able to know what I was thinking and feeling?"

"'Could see your streams," I said between mouthfuls.

"What, through my shields?" he asked worriedly.

"They make it harder," I simply said.  "But if I concentrate, I can usually make out enough to get the gist of what someone is thinking.  Especially you and Suz."

"I guess your dad was right," Joey thought out loud.

"Right about what?" Suzi queried.

"When we were down in Venezuela together, Tim's dad said the reason why Gladius teamed teens together was because they would form stronger links with each other than other people could.  Or something like that.  His dad was convinced I would be able to feel Tim out no matter where he was because we did so much together when he started getting the hang of his voice...  Holy shit.  Remember when those two assholes at the mall handcuffed me and then raped you?  Tim, you said you felt something was wrong that night and that's why you called me."

"Yeah.  And I was inside the Nursery too when I felt it."

"Shit, that's right."

"What's so special about the Nursery?" Suzi asked.

"The walls have this wood in them that blocks telepathy," Joey explained.  "That's how Gladius hid him from everyone there.  Including me."

"So what does this have to do with what happened last night?" Suzi sighed.

"Yeah, Joey."

"I don't know.  I just thought it was interesting," Joey said with a disappointed shrug.

"Well then I'll tell you what it has to do with it," said after munching on my bacon thoughtfully a minute.  "I think what's happening while I'm asleep is I'm just tuning into someone else's streams enough that my dreams become reconstructions of what I make out from them."

"Yeah, but then I should be able to feel you probing me," Joey objected.

"Do you feel me probing you now?" I said, looking at Suzi while I had my attention on Joey's streams.

The both hesitated for they weren't sure who I was talking to, then Suzi opted to answer since I was looking at her.

"Not you silly," I said before she could speak.  "Joey."

"No," he said just as I recognized his digestive streams working to expel some excess air from his system.

"Excuse you, Joey."

"What?" he said, burped, then said, "Excuse me."

Suzi and I both chuckled, then when Joey realized the joke was on him, he had this expression on his face I hadn't seen since our freshman year of high school.  Then Suzi and I just looked at each other knowing we had both been thinking the same thing.

"Just don't go waiting for Wishmaker to burp before embarrassing him today," Joey said as his slight blush started to fade.

"Embarrass him?  You know that's not my style," I said, feeling a little edgy about the impending conversation.

"I just can't wait to see his face..." he said with a grin.

"You both aren't planning on watching this thing, are you?"

"Well I'm not," Suzi said as she absent-mindedly probed some fresh meat that had just come in the doors.

"Why?" Joey asked me cautiously.  "You don't have a problem with spectators, do you?"

"Hell no.  The more the better.  But..."

Joey was pretty upset that I didn't want him present for the showdown at noon.  He didn't see how he being there would make him appear to be my backup in the unlikely event that Terrence actually was able to penetrate my defenses.  I trusted the integrity of the group not to let it go as far as my life being in danger, but with Joey there, it might complicate things.

Plus Suzi had taken a serious interest in two frat boys who were eating a few tables away, and Joey and Suzi ended up going back to Suz's apartment with them while I kept myself occupied off campus by shopping around town.

I felt odd as I wandered around the strip malls, yet I couldn't put my finger on what exactly felt odd.  It wasn't until I was driving back to campus for the telepathic dual that I noticed I felt a bit stuffed up, like I was coming down with a cold.  Yet that wasn't quite it either.

The cathedral's clock's larger hand was halfway between the 9 and 10 when I reached the square in front of it.  I was thrilled to see over fifty people were waiting to watch the duel, some of the voices having brought their...  companions.

"I don't know what you said to Joey, but you sure pissed him off," Neil said, suddenly beside me.  "He broke the share link with me when I said I was coming to watch."

"Sorry," I simply said, feeling a bit apprehensive, even a little nervous about the upcoming dual.  "He'll get over it though."

"Yeah, I guess," he said, resisting his urge to press me for more info, or at least probably until after the match was over.

I passively scanned crowd, finding for the most part they expected me to win, but hoped it wouldn't be too quick of a battle, or too long.

"So what do you think?  Should I just go for the kill right away, or see what tricks he has first?" I asked Neil without looking at him.

"Hmmm...  A quick kill would definitely deflate the hot air in his head, but it wouldn't be as fun."

"Agreed," I said, giving Terrence a confident smile just as he happened to look at me, and noting the flash of uncertainty pass through his eyes.  "Besides, I don't want to disappoint the crowd.  They're expecting a good fight."

Slowly, the hands of the giant clock moved to the upright position, and on the first strike of the bell, Terrence released a quick resonating probe of pure energy that surprised me enough that I couldn't bring up my shields before it returned to him with the information he sought.

"Nice one, Terrence," I called out loud to him.  "I don't think knowing what strategy I WAS going to use is going to help you any though."

"We'll see," he cautiously shouted back.

"'scuse me," I said to Neil as I formed my first blanketing illusion and disappeared from the crowd's sight.

The gasps and general turmoil caused by the crowd made me want to giggle as I walked briskly to ten feet away from Terrence at approximately thirty degrees to his right, then as Terrence and a few others in the crowd scanned for my position as well as for how I was deceiving their eyes, I manipulated their scans to show my position to be forty-five degrees to his left and altered the illusion to show me popping up there as well.

"Surprise," my illusion said as Terrence stabbed at it with a fast telepathic blow, then it disappeared again.

"No, no... Over here," my image said as it blinked back into existence ten feet behind him.

After he threw another telepathic jab at my image, I could tell he wasn't going to fall for the same trick again, so I dissolved my blanketing sensory streams and said, "What's the matter, Terrence?  Can't figure out what's real?"

He took a deep breath like he was going to yell, but instead quite surprisingly used the energy to generate a low level pulse I had no hopes of deceiving.

I just grinned at his indecision after the pulse didn't reveal my location being anywhere he hadn't already sensed me to be.  Despite the energy barriers protecting his mind, I could see the thoughts running through his head just by watching his face as he came to realize I was really standing right where he perceived to me.

This time when he probed me, I raised my barriers up long enough to protect my altered plans, then felt the first tingling of discomfort deep within my brain as he attacked my mind with not one, but two command streams.

"Say, that's pretty neat," I commented as I canceled the two streams as they emerged from his barriers.  "Let me try that."

I formed two, then added two more streams when he seemed quite able to handle the first pair.  I was impressed at how he was able to continue emitting his two control streams while at the same time maintaining his barrier.

I, on the other hand, was expelling significantly less energy than he was simply because I wasn't having to maintain a barrier to shield my mind.  Yet I was starting to feel a bit drained, and every once in a while I would feel this sudden throb in my head, which was really starting to concern me.

"Terrence, I wasn't planning on making this so short, but I think I'm coming down with a cold or something," I said as I turned up the intensity of my streams and inspected his barrier for a weak spot.

"It's not over until it's OVER!" he growled and threw practically all of the telepathic energy he was using for his barrier directly at me.

I only had an instant to react to raise my barriers again to absorb the telepathic fireball, and was already forming the new command stream to seize control of his mind while his barrier was so weak when it hit me and sent a blinding flash of pain through the inner recesses of my brain.

My scream startled everyone, including Terrence who stood there dumbfounded as I started to get up from the crouched position I had fallen down into.  Just as my finger pressed against this strange foreign object in my left nostril, Terrence started pounding me with bursts of telepathic energy.

Pain shot through my head with each blow, and between that and feeling the familiar sensation of blood running out my nose after the foreign object in my nostril burst under pressure, I suddenly realized the true extent of the damage the group's attack in January had done to me.

In a desperate surge of fear, remorse, and anger, I transmitted this realization in a pulse to everyone there.  Terrence at first thought it to be a ruse and pounded me with two more pulses before watching me fall to my hands and finally noticed the blood coming out of my nose.

Even after he stopped sending them, the pulses kept ringing in my head and stimulated new bursts of pain that shot throughout my body as well.

Like a survivor instinct, I knew I had to get to Joey as quickly as possible, and as people started closing around me trying to sense or ask me what was wrong, I lunged myself in the direction I knew Joey to be.

I was barely aware that it was Neil who helped me back to my feet after another jolt of pain tripped me to the ground the third time.  After I tried to shake him off me, he looked me in the eyes and said, "I'll help you."  All I could do was nod my head before shutting my eyes as my head exploded again.

It took us ten minutes to reach the apartments on foot.  Neil was extremely annoyed with Joey's refusal to answer his telepathic messages, but he didn't say a word about it when Joey opened the main door of the apartment building when we approached it.

Joey and Neil helped me into my bedroom, then after Suzi called Neil out, Joey shut the door and came over to me.

"Hey," Joey said in my face to get my attention.  When my eyes met his, he said, "Remember the Alamo."

Just like that, the pain stopped and my mind cleared.  I laid on my bed a few moments blinking as I sorted through what happened, then looked Joey in the eyes again and said, "Thanks."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"I take it it worked?"

"Couldn't have worked better," I said, rubbing the left side of my nose before remembering the empty capsule of fake blood was still up there.  "Can you hand me a tissue?"

"So was it worth it?" Joey said as he handed me the box of tissues from my dresser.

"I hope so.  I hate to think I went through all that for nothing.  Shit, Joey.  That pain felt real!"

"Shh.." Joey said, reminding me that Neil was in the next room with Suzi.  "I guess I haven't lost my touch then," he said grinning.

After pulling out the empty capsule from my nostril, I got up and went into the bathroom to wash the fake blood off my face saying "Nope.  From the moment we split up at breakfast to the moment you said the trigger phrase, I had no idea my perception had been altered."

"Who says it still isn't," Joey kidded.

"The fact that I'm still breathing does."

"Like I couldn't figure out away around that," Joey said.

"Well, don't go out of your way trying to work out how since I'd never let you try it in the first place."

"Hmmph.  Oh ye of little faith."

"It's not about faith, Joey," I said as I returned to the bedroom, sat down beside him, and put my arm over his shoulder.  "Or.."

"If you say the t word, I'll puke all over you," he said seriously, yet with a touch of humor in his eyes.

So I didn't say it in words.  I just shared it with him empathically, very much like how the twins would communicated to us without actually making eye contact.

To my frustration, his natural response to this triggered Suzi's commands, causing him to turn away uncomfortably saying, "We better go.  Suzi won't be able to distract Neil much longer."

I let a frustrated sigh escape as I got up to follow Joey out, but was completely distracted from this the moment I entered the room with the others and sensed Neil had already figured things out.

"Feeling better?" Neil asked.

"Lots," I said truthfully.

"Joey to the rescue," he said somewhat sarcastically.

Suzi's glared at me a moment, reminding me that she hadn't liked the whole idea from the beginning, and that now she wanted me to fess up to Neil before he got any angrier than he was.

"I guess.  But you helped me first...  Thanks."

"Yeah...  Good old gullible Neil," he said, looking Joey in the eyes a moment.

"Aw... Come on, Neil..." Joey said apologetically.  "It wasn't like that."

"No?...  No, I guess not.  You probably didn't expect me to help him afterwards.  You wouldn't have done such a crappy job of acting afterwards if you had planned to use me like that."

"Blame me for it, not him," I defended Joey.  "This was all my idea, and you're right.  I didn't even consider what you might do.  For what it's worth, I'm sorry.  I didn't intend for you to get caught in the middle of..."

"I don't fucking care!" Neil blurted out.  He turned to Joey and said heatedly "I don't care you lied to me, I don't even care if you all used me or not!  The point is I always come second!  I'm fucking sick of working my schedule around Tim's when most of the time it doesn't matter because he's always out doing his own thing anyway!  But I guess it shouldn't surprise me at all that you wouldn't include me in on something like this.  I bet you didn't even think of letting me in on it, did you?  DID YOU!"

When Joey's guilty face could only stare at the floor, Neil said, "FUCK," turned, flung the door open, and left.

"Neil!  Neil don't go like this!" Suzi cried before yelling at me, "I told you this wasn't a good idea!" and ran out after him.

"Suz!" Joey protested, then let out a frustrated groan while pitching himself onto the couch.

"I'm sorry Joey.  I shouldn't have asked you to help me with this," I said guiltily.

"I started the mess.  It was right for you to ask me to help you undo it.  It's not your fault Neil wants to have a hissy fit about it."

The lump in my throat grew as I opened my mouth and said, "You don't really work your schedule around mine, do you?"

"Nah... He's exaggerating.  There were a couple of times when I thought you and I would have time to do something together that I told Neil I wouldn't be able do stuff then.  Suzi's the only I really base my schedule around."

"Then why are you feeling so guilty?"

"Because I did consider letting him in on it, but I also wanted him to be there in case something went wrong.  I knew he'd be pissed at first, but not like this."

"Joey," I began cautiously, breaking a lengthy period of silence between us.  "Ever since I first met him, Neil has purposely avoided making eye contact with me.  I've had people do that before, but sooner or later I catch them off guard and after they experiencing it, they realize they don't really have anything to hide that's worth the trouble."

"But not Neil," Joey concluded for me.  "That doesn't mean he's hiding something from you.  He's just being defensive."

"Yeah, that's what I had figured too.  But...  Now, I'm not so sure."

"What do you mean?  You think he's a spy or something?"  Joey said incredibly.

"No, nothing like that."

"Then what?"

"I don't know, but I think it has something to do with why he reacted like he did to this."

Joey let out a long sigh before looking me in the eyes and asking, "What was he feeling?"

After my eyebrows shot up in surprise, Joey said, "Come on.  I know that's what you're basing your assumptions on.  What was he feeling?  Betrayal?  Jealousy?"

"Disgust... Anger...  and I think he was restraining some fear."

"Fear?  What kind of fear?"

"He's very careful not to let out too many signals for me to feel him out all the way, and I've never sensed any malevolent emotions from him, so I don’t try to pry into his emotions while he obviously doesn't want me to..."

"But ..."

"But...  I'm fairly certain he's hiding something.  Something he doesn't want us know about.  And now I think its more specific to hiding it from you."

"Me?  What could he possibly have to hide from me?  Are you sure you're not getting your wires crossed?"

"No.  Like I said, he purposely makes it hard for me to read him.  But Joey, I am sure of one thing."

"Great.  What?"

"You're his best friend."

Joey eyes had a touch of guilt in them when they connected with mine for a mere instant before rolling north as he sighed, "Share links do have that affect, don't they."

"Among other things," I said before going over to the kitchen for a glass of juice to give him a moment to his thoughts.

Sometime in late February during a long hard freeze, I had come across a few birds in the back yard of our apartment building trying to find something to eat.  When I had sensed how truly hungry they were, I rushed outside with the remaining quarter loaf of bread I had on hand and summoned all the hungry birds in the immediate area for a meal.

Suzi had to lure me back inside with her own half loaf before I would stop driving my organized chaos of feathers long enough to put a coat on.  After having no bread for a week due to the expectant hopes of my newfound friends, Suzi and I went out and bought a half a dozen bird feeders for the back yard.

As I drank my orange juice, I peered out the kitchen window at the bird feeders, automatically reaching out with my mind to feel out the birds pecking through the scattered seed that earlier birds had purposely knocked out of the feeders while digging for the sunflower seeds.  They were obviously disturbed by the presence of a nearby threat, and it only took a moment to recognize the two clusters of swirling streams of symbols and realize Suzi and Neil were standing outside at the back fence watching the birds as well.

Looking out through one of the dove's eyes, it was obvious Suzi had done her magic and had calmed Neil down enough that she got him to break into a grin momentarily.  In fact, I quickly realized his guard was down and that my empathic senses were picking up his true feelings a little clearer even through the rather psychedelic vision the dove had.

When Neil noticed my stare, I suddenly found him innocently looking me straight in the eyes.

Natural empathy largely relies on the subconscious processing of the miniscule but definitive bits of emotional data given off by the human body, and the generation of responses to enhance the desired emotions of another.  The problem was, a dove's body, especially its face, doesn't have the appropriate features to generate the correct signals for a human, so I ended up amusing Neil and Suzi with strange feather arrangements and head bobbings as I tried to dive into his soul with my empathic sense.

"Timmy, you better stop that before you hurt the poor thing," Suzi said to the dove after I lost my/the dove's balance for a moment.

Slightly offended by her lack of faith in my bird-skills, I had all five doves raise their wings as high as they comfortably could go, prance around each other in a circle, then do a curtsy before I released them and they flew off in an explosion of wings beating air.

Just as I finished rinsing out my empty glass, Joey suddenly rolled off the couch exclaiming "Red Alert!" before leaping across the room and out the door.

"So much for a relaxing Sunday afternoon," I said to myself as I watched the three of them pile into Suzi's car and drive off.

Over the next week or so, the group was on constant alert as they kept detecting one or more people's probes on campus.  Even I sensed a few, and I wasn't trying to.  The probes were so short and so well targeted that by the time you realized it was a probe and reached out to trace its source, the probe was finished and the telepathic signal was gone.

At first I was absolutely mystified as to how anyone could direct a probe so accurately without having to broadcast a wide field probe to discern their target's location.  But then it hit me that I could do the exact same thing using my symbolic vision, and you can guess what I concluded from that.

The response I got from the group when I told them what they were dealing with was discouraging to say the least.  Even Suzi didn't find this news upsetting as I felt it should have.  Apparently I had never really considered what it would be like to go up against another with the sight before, where everyone in the group had ever since that morning I demonstrated it by taking down a third of them while they were already at full alert.

I didn't see Joey or Neil at all that week, and only saw Suzi when she came home to shower and change clothes... with my favorite gorilla accompanying her every time.

Suzi had told me he had been bugging her about getting to meet me for weeks, and he apparently hadn't been able to go to the duel the previous Sunday because everyone else had gone.  So when Suzi notified me she and Rich Bugle were going to swing by my place after she showered, I rushed around in a near panic to prepare.

I purposely had my back turned when Suzi opened the door, then after Suzi introduced me, I twirled around with my hand out for a shake saying, "Also known as slippery Tim."

Oh, the satisfaction...  It was pure bliss.  His jaw hit his chest so hard when it opened that he nearly lost is sunglasses from the jolt.  And just as Rich recovered enough for his anger to kick in, I anxiously grabbed the Ruma's deli sack from the table and held it out as calmly as I could saying, "Peace?"

His grumbling stomach calmed his anger enough that he didn't break my arm as he snatched the bag from my slightly wavering hand, then after inspecting the contents, he muttered, "Thanks," before giving Suzi a dirty look while saying, "We need to go."

After bravely saying goodbye to both of them as they left, I stood frozen in place sweating for nearly a whole minute before I sat down from my shaking adrenaline soaked muscles and finally just busted out laughing.

Encouraged by Suzi's observation that Rich had been somewhat appeased by my food offering, I went out of my way to make sure I would have something hot, tasty, and because he was an Eta, not too greasy available to me on short notice. (Etas have special restrictions to their diet so their bulk is as close to 100% lean muscle as possible, and that meant they didn't get to eat fast food very often.)

So whenever Suzi was about to run home after sleeping in the medical complex like everyone else in the group, she would let me know so I would have enough time to either get something run over to me or fix something myself to feed the gorilla while Suzi showered and changed.

The more I learned about him, the more threatening he became to me.  Sarah had three graduates assigned to keeping Rich in the best shape he physically could be, and she continuously tested him in various ways, many times without warning.

Sarah's cloak and dagger testing had forced Rich to adopt the "assume everyone is hostile" attitude, and that somewhat explained why he had acted as he did when we first met.

Finding out that he had even fought off three Eta's single handedly once, I found I could no longer think to myself, "he could rip me in half," and know I was exaggerating.

Anyway, all my trouble and work definitely had an effect on his disposition towards me, but not the kind I had hoped for.  I don't call him gorilla for no reason.  Animals can smell your fear, and this telepathically immune gorilla definitely smelled mine.

I couldn't help it.  He was so large, so powerful, and my only true defense was dependant on knocking his sunglasses off which now had half circle earpieces on the ends of the arms to help prevent them from falling off.  I wanted get along with everyone there, and I didn't like the concept of having someone like Rich holding a grudge against me.  The knowledge that I had gotten away from him twice before didn't comfort me anymore since now he knew where I lived, and I knew revenge was very high on his list of things he liked to do.

After the first couple of meals, he mentioned he liked tuna fish cheese melts, then when I made that for him the next day, he started telling me what he wanted to eat the next day.  I only humored him the first time, but then when I had takeout Chinese instead of whatever it was he had asked for...  Well, it wasn't pretty.  He belittled me, tripped me once, and then just before he left, he grabbed me by the neck and mouth and made me promise him I'd have steak with all the trimmings for him the next day.

The worst part about all of this was, the sensations I felt through Loretta, the gorilla's ex-girlfriend, kept coming back to me.  After he left the building and I finished thoroughly cussing out his entire ancestry, I had to take a cold shower to stop the crazy erotic thoughts I was having.

The probes stopped the next morning, but Suzi wasn't allowed to leave the medical complex due to the threat of an imminent attack.  I offered to bring her a change of clothes, but I wasn't allowed to do so for the same security reasons she wasn't allowed to leave.

But that didn't stop Rich from calling me that evening and telling me he wanted his steak dinner brought to him.  Outraged, I barely managed to say, "It'll be about an hour," before slamming the phone back on the hook and headed for the kitchen to start cooking.

Steak wasn't the only thing I was cooking that evening.  Part of me was saying I needed to stand up to him like a man, and another part of me wanted to just do what I had to do to appease him and leave it be.  But I knew better than to listen to my emotions.  Fight or submit.  That's what he'd expect me to do.  That's what all bullies expect you to do.  But those are never your only options.

When he finally came out of the medical complex's loading dock door an hour later, he was surprised to find I had set up a little table with a setting for two.  The weather was unusually warm that night, so it was perfect for a dinner for two under the stars.

"What's this?" he asked suspiciously.

"Your steak dinner with all the fixings," I said calmly.

"And who's the other plate for?" he asked threateningly.  "You?"

"Let's just say it's a surprise."

"Just make sure it's a good one," he said as I went over to my car, his eyes watching me carefully, then turned to his food.

Rich was so involved with his steak that he didn't notice the limo drive up until the door opened and the occupant exclaimed, "Are you starting without me?"

"Lori?  What the hell are you doing here?"

"I came for dinner, stupid.  What did you think?"

I walked up with a champagne bottle saying, "I thought you might enjoy some female company with your steak.  Was I wrong?"

He eyed me carefully a moment, then smiled broadly as he turned towards Lori and tried to grab her like a piece of meat.

Again, the satisfaction of watching her flip him onto his back was most rewarding, and best of all, she had done it all on her own.

"Playing hard to get again, eh?" Rich gasped as he desperately sucked his breath back into his lungs.

Lori winked at me as she sat down in her seat, then after I scooted her in, I started poring the champagne.

Rich sat down and started to eat again, but it was obvious that his attention was so split between Lori, myself, and everything else around him that he could have been eating cow manure and wouldn't have known the difference.

I waited on them like a faithful manservant, speaking only when spoken to, and even called them ma'am and sir as I served them their desert.  Rich had finally relaxed enough to enjoy the double fudge cake, and he was actually being very charming to Lori who was for the most part receptive to his act.  All in all, the dinner lasted an hour, and I was almost forgetting whom I was dealing with by the time the limo returned and announced it was time for Lori to go.

Anticipating I was about to spring my trap, Rich walked Lori to the limo with one hand around her and the other clenching into a fist then relaxing repeatedly.  I could feel his presence in the air as he kissed her good night, his senses fully alert for whatever was to come.

But nothing came except the wind following the limo's departure, and after standing there for several moments ready to leap in any direct, he finally barked, "What the fuck are you up to?"

"Up to?" I said innocently, then took a deep swig of the champagne straight from the bottle and said "What makes you think I'm up to anything?"

"How did you know about Lori!" he demanded, walking up to me with a fast and powerful stride.

"She has such a nice athletic build.  I can see why you like her," I commented confidently.

So confidently that it made him stop in his tracks and ask in a cold, almost nervous voice, "Are you threatening me?"

"Did you enjoy your steak?" I asked with earnest, looking myself in my own eyes through the reflection of his sunglasses.  "Did you have a good time?  Or were you so paranoid about what I was planning that you couldn't?"

"You tricked me!" he said, leaping to the conclusion I was trying to obtain.

"I didn't have to," I said honestly into my own eyes.  "But at least you didn't make a fool of yourself like I thought you might.  I'd say you scored some pretty good points with Lori.  Especially since she thought the dinner was all your idea."

"What?  Why?" he choked.

"She broke up with you because she thought you were as romantic as sledgehammer, remember?"

"What do you want from me?" he said tensely.

"An apology would be nice," I said daringly.  "But if you can't manage that, I'll settle for you leaving me alone.  I don't like kissing peoples asses.  Or at least not ones as big as yours."

"And if I don't?" he said menacingly while stepping forward to tower over me.

"Lay a finger on me again, I'll sue your ass for everything its worth," I said coolly and without a hint of fear in my voice.

He stood there expressionless for several long moments before poking me in the chest with his finger and saying, "Stay out of my way, and stay away from Lori, and I'll pretend you don't exist."

And with that he went back inside, leaving me to clean up the mess.

Besides not being my style, revenge always seems to have this way of making things worse, and I believe that most people got what they deserved sooner or later.

Take Steven for example.  This man brainwashed my best friend into being my worst enemy, made Suzi into a mindless sexual animal, and did numerous unspeakable things to other people I cared about not just to torture me, but because he also liked to do it.  Suzi, Joey, Dana, and Jerry all have his dark nightmare living within them, effecting them in different ways, and it will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Joey's guilt about the things he did as Joseph and later while recovering his identity had made him so unconfident about his own decision making abilities that it was only natural he found comfort in letting someone else make the decisions for him, that person naturally being Suzi.  He also tends to blame himself for any unhappiness Suzi or I experience whether he had anything to do with it or not.

Steven's greatest mark on Suzi was removing every last trace of sexual inhibition to the point where even rape is just another form of sexual intercourse to her.  This only reinforces Joey's guilt since it was Joseph who had raped her time and time again while she was under the influences of that drug.  Joey and I both share this fear that Suzi may someday forget herself while playing with her boy toys and seriously get herself hurt or even killed.

Dana has this fixation on getting pregnant by Jerry, while Jerry constantly struggles with his ingrained need to have sex with her every chance they get, pregnant or not.  I called them from time to time just to see how they were doing, and I'll never forgive Steven for what he did to them from hearing them cussing each other out horribly in anger followed by their mad fuck, which was their way of settling any disagreement.

Yes, I wanted and still want Steven to pay for his crimes and all the pain he has caused.  And while I was his prisoner, I wouldn't have given it a second thought about killing the bastard with my own two hands if I had been given the chance.  But that was because he was a deadly threat to not just me, but many others, and that would be the only reason I could ever use deadly force on another.

After Joey shot him in all four limbs, this proving his hold over Joey had finally been broken, I wanted nothing to do with the man.  Oh, I checked to make sure he would never be able to harm me or anyone else again, but I didn't waste any more of my time on him after I was told his telepathic abilities had been permanently disabled and he would most likely never walk without the aid of a cane again.

To inflict suffering upon a crippled and defenseless man, no matter what he may have done to me in the past, was, and still is, wrong.  To seek revenge puts you on their level if not beneath them, and invites retaliation by not just your target, but by others who would never otherwise involve themselves in your business.

Rich was still somewhat a threat to me, and I was pretty pissed having to clean up everything myself after quite frankly bending over backwards to befriend the big ape.  But I wasn't about to do anything to seek retribution for all my trouble.  The guy just better never push his luck with me again or I'd follow through on my lawsuit.

Either that or sick the twins on him.  Once they seeded him, I wouldn't have minded homing my empathic controls by making Rich the toy dance around in a tutu and having him serve me a steak dinner or two.  As entertaining as that was, I doubted I would go that far.  He would really have to piss me off for that to happen.  Lucky for him, he never did.

Suzi came home the following night, looking more tired than I had ever seen her.  She invited me in, and after sitting down on the couch with a glass of Gatorade, she asked me to go turn on the shower for her, which I did without giving it a thought.

She kind of surprised me when I came out and found her laying on her back topless while struggling to pull off her jeans with one hand.

"You want me to go?"

"Not unless you want too," she grunted, then violently shook her legs in an attempt to fling the loosened pants off them.

"Here, let me do it," I insisted, then when she didn't object, I not only took her jeans off, I took her panties off and carried her to the shower.

"Where's Joey when you need him," I said as she got in and I started to walk out.

"He's probably even more tired than I am," she said just before I heard the soap hit the floor of the shower.

When she sat down in the stall with a sigh and didn't get back up, I hesitated by the door undecided whether to offer to help her or not.

When she dropped the soap again and groaned with frustration, I took a deep breath before asking, "You want some help in there?"

"What?"

"I said, "Would you like some help?""

"What, you mean, like washing my back?"

"If that's what you need help with," I said, trying to restrain my excitement.

The soap bounced around the stall again before she answered, "I guess.  I'm not getting anywhere in here.

"Down boy," I commanded as I probably broke my own personal stripping record.  I had to pause a moment to deflate before opening the shower door, then forgot all about it from the sight before my eyes.

I suppose it was her dripping wet hair that made her look so... pitiful.  I washed her with the same tenderness and... professional manner as I did my little brother.  The little pecks on her forehead were the only actions I desired to give her, and once I tucked her in her bed and got dressed myself, I felt really good about how innocent it had remained.

An hour before dawn that Saturday, I headed over to the old admin building to do some comparisons between ressy and non-ressy symbol streams after a bolt of inspiration hit me in class the day before.  This was the first time I had returned to the admin building since the duel with Terrence, and I wanted to do my scans and leave before that day's contestants showed up to keep appearances up that I was ashamed of my defeat.

I sensed Perry's clouded mind still apparently asleep as I entered, so I took a moment to marvel at how thoroughly hidden his thoughts were even while he was fast asleep.  I didn't do that long, however.  I wouldn't have been surprised if Perry could somehow detect a telepath's attention upon him, and I could only guess what he'd do if he caught me examining his privacy shield.

I quit my scans a little before eight, frustrated this time by just how complex and numerous the symbol pattern differences between ressies were, let alone the differences between them and the non-ressies.  Different ideas of how to start recording and classifying these differences were spinning around in my head as I made my way down to the ground floor on those squeaky steps, but my attention snapped completely onto the door opening ahead of me as I left the staircase and headed towards the exit.

Right on cue, the "SHLNG" was followed by the slight whooshing of Perry's cane as it came at me.  Minding the razor sharp blades protruding from the end, I managed to catch it, spun it on my finger in a 270 before holding it out to Perry who calmly hobbled towards me, carefully sipping his coffee.

Perry took his cane, retracted the blades with a twist of the neck, and continued towards his office without breaking his stride

But he did grunt, "Not bad, Branson.  There may be hope for you yet."

Branson?!?

"Not bad yourself.  You didn't even drip your coffee."

He grunted an acknowledgement, then as he unlocked his office's door, he added, "New board's up if you want to sign up."

I was about to say no thank you, but then thought twice as "Branson" echoed through my head.

There were only four names on the board, two on one day, two on another, so I picked out the next Saturday, rather curious to see who would sign up to challenge me.  There were only two weeks of classes left to the semester, and since about half of the voices would go home for the break, most would try to squeeze themselves in before finals.  Someone was bound to sign up on my day if for no other reason than to squeeze it in.

Okay, I admit I'm not the neatest penman, especially when writing on the chalkboard.  Last month when I signed up, the d and t kind of got overlapped, and if you blurred your eyes, it did look somewhat like a deformed s, mostly from the way I make my ds.

Anyway, this time I carefully printed my name, "Timothy Brandton", fitting my last name under the first so it all fit in the box.  I would have put my middle name as well, but it wouldn't have left much space for anyone else to sign.

Perry had left his office before I had decided on a day, but returned as I was walking out.

I said, "See you next week, Perry," then got the grunt acknowledgement I expected as I headed for the building's exit.

But just before I reached the door, I heard Perry...  Well, it sounded like a dog trying to bark while wearing a collar three sizes two small, but in Perry's case it was a choked gasp, and was followed by the sound of his coffee cup shattering on the floor.

"Perry, you alri..." I exclaimed before stopping dead in my tracks from the ashen color of his face and the intense vibe of fear he emitted when he looked over at me.

His left hand was covering his heart while the other abandoned his cane for the edge of the desk to steady his wobbling frame.  I immediately thought he was having a heart attack, and when he didn't respond to my question asking him this, I reached over to the phone and dialed 911.

The 911 operator had just answered when Perry laid his hand over the cradle disconnecting me, then firmly rasped, "I'm fine.  Please go."

"But," I said, noting his color wasn't quite back to normal.

"OUT!" he bellowed, reasserting his control over the situation.

"Okay, okay..." I said, walking out of the office, but hesitating at the building's exit unsure whether I should leave him alone.

His phone rang, and he answered it with his usual friendly demeanor.

"What do you want!?"

....

"No, I dialed the wrong number!  Who the hell decided on using 911 in a town with 991 phone numbers anyway!  Don't you people have any...  Hello!  HELLO!  <clang> Morons."

"I said GET OUT!" he shouted a moment later when he came out of the office, probably to get a mop to clean up the coffee on the floor.

I didn't have to be told a third time.

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