Part XVIII - 6: Her First Day Out

"Good morning. You look like you're happy to be going back to school." I said as she got in my car Tuesday morning.

"You must have read my mind," she joked before kissing me on the lips.

"How did it feel to sleep in your own bed last night?" I said as I waved to Lee and pulled out of her driveway.

"Actually," she yawned, "I didn't get much sleep. Lee kept me up until two... "

I waited patiently as she yawned again and then stretched, enjoying the glowing happiness she was emitting to my empathic senses.

"And I think I've gotten too used to sleeping in a bigger bed. I was almost afraid to move in my little twin bed."

"Sounds like you'll be getting a bigger bed for your birthday," I teased.

"Don't do that!" she laughed.

"Is that perfume?" I said, suddenly getting a whiff of something flowery and sweet.

"Do you like it? Lee got for me."

"Usually I don't care for perfume, but in this case... It... It smells like roses... "

"Uh huh... I thought you'd like it," she said proudly.

We chattered back and forth the way to school, never mentioning anything about the symbols or telepathy or any of that. It was just her and I being two normal teens who happened to be in love.

But when we entered the school and Jennifer saw all the symbols spinning around the countless minds in the hall, she stopped in her tracks and sighed, "Ewwww... Look at them all... "

"Heh. I knew you'd get a kick out of it. Hey. I want to show you something. This is what Joey and I call a blanket command."

I formed the blanket, then tossed it over the crowd, Jennifer giggling when everyone instantaneously jumped up once without noticing they and everyone else had done so.

"That was really neat! The symbols... You had just enough for everyone, and they all reached everyone at the same time, even the people at the end of the hall... You have to show me that one later. It must have taken you a long time to figure that out."

"Well, actually... " I began before noticing Higgs giving me a "That wasn't funny," look standing in the middle of the hall. "Uhm, Jennifer... like don't play around with anyone at school, okay? Higgs would really get pissed if you did, and I owe him a lot. All right?"

She sighed, then noticed Higgs herself and quickly glanced away from him shyly.

"Okay... I won't. But you said you'd show me stuff today... "

"I will, but not during school, okay? Meet me upstairs after school. I know a few people who owe me a few favors that will agree to let us... Uhm... practice on them."

"Really? Okay. I love you."

I gave her the kiss and thought to her "I love you too."

While technically I couldn't actually send her my thoughts like I did everyone else, her telepathic senses had matured enough to detect my attempt and automatically intercept it, ending up experiencing the same thing as everyone else, just with a little more work involved for her.

Higgs let a small hint of a smile show through his principal mask of sternness, so when I reached his position I just said, "I did warn you before I did it."

"I didn't expect everyone in the office to jump too," he said with a trace of humor as we began walking in the direction of my locker. "It was a good thing Joyce didn't have the coffee pot in her hand. She would have scalded herself for sure."

"Lucky for her, huh... " I said amused.

"So you did make her have that sneezing fit," he stated.

As three people in different areas of the hallway started sneezing at the same time, I said, "Now what makes you think that?"

He chuckled, but then got very serious and said, "I hope you don't let your feelings for her blind you when she reaches that point where she will need you to be firm with her. You do know she's going to abuse her powers at some point, and you're the only one who can... reprimand her."

"You mean punish her," I said uncomfortably as I opened my locker.

"No... You punish someone if they do something they know to be wrong. I don't believe Jennifer will know she's doing anything wrong when she does it, so I suppose the best word for it would be to correct her. Have her fix her mistake if possible, and make sure she understands that you will not tolerate that kind of abuse ever again. The most important thing you have to remember is to be firm. But not vindictive. That would be even worse than punishment."

"Okay... I'll remember that."

"Tim... " he said as he became filled with doubt. "I'm taking an awfully big risk here by allowing her back to school like this. It's almost a certainty that she'll do whatever she does here."

I sighed, feeling the weight of the responsibility for Jennifer's future actions being set "firmly" on my shoulders. I shut my locker's door very carefully, allowing it to only make the slightest "clink" of the latch as I accepted the possibilities of what could lay ahead. Before Higgs had made me face them, I had simply acknowledged their existence without really taking them seriously. But when I turned around and looked up at him, he saw that I was looking at the whole picture without covering the less pleasant part with my thumb, and was satisfied by my nod of committal to do whatever had to be done.

Despite my excitement for what I wanted to show Jennifer later that day, I couldn't help but feel a bit... Well, disappointed doesn't really describe it well enough, but it's the closest thing I can think of to what I felt. I had been looking forward to showing her my more elaborate uses of my abilities ever since... Well, heck. Even before I found out she was telepathic. And now that she could actually appreciate the true nature of what I would be showing her, having the responsibility of making sure she didn't use what I was showing in a bad way just kind of took some of the fun or pleasure out of it for me.

The worse part of it was, Higgs doubts had produced a lurking doubt within me where there hadn't been any before. And this doubt didn't have anything to do with Jennifer directly. It was the worse kind of doubt, for self doubt poised the greatest danger of failing to "correct" Jennifer's mistakes if and when she made them.

My mood lighten at lunchtime just because I was with her for a while, but even then I felt more conscious of how powerful Jennifer would be once she had gained all the knowledge I would be sharing with her in the weeks ahead.

Suzi surprised me in fifth hour asking me if I and Jennifer could go to the basketball game with her on Friday.

"I'll see if she wants to go, but why isn't Joey... "

"He's busy... " she said in an aggravated voice. "Joey always has an excuse not to go. I'm the president of the student council and I have yet to see one single basketball game this year. You know how well they are doing."

"Yeah. They haven't lost a game yet. Okay, Suz. I'm sure Jennifer will go, especially if I mention the fact nobody knows who the mascot is."

"Do you know who it is?" she asked with interest.

"Heh. Sorry Suz. Even if I did know, I wouldn't tell. That's the best kept secret in the school, and I'm not about to let it out. Jennifer might though... "

"Hmmph. Oh well. If Jennifer doesn't tell me either, I guess I could always ask Jo... "

We both looked at each other with the same thought, then Suzi said, "You have to tell me if it is him."

"Oh, I will. I promise."

"Sorry I'm late," Jennifer said as she burst into the room on the third floor. "I wasn't paying atten... "

She never finished her sentence since only the three girls I had recruited that day were currently in the room.

"Where's Tim?" she asked them.

They just sat there and smiled sweetly at her, then just as Jennifer tried to probe them, I touched her shoulder which made her jump a foot off the ground.

"HOW did you sneak up on me!" she said, half amazed, half irritated.

"You already depend on your abilities too much, sweetie," I said attempting to give her a wicked kiss.

"Now now... " she said, pushing my face away playfully. "None of that while you're on duty, teach."

I sighed discontentedly, then was happy to accept the simple kiss on the lips that caused a bit of a stir with the three freshmen sitting on the couch.

Jennifer's eyes sparkled with energy knowing why they were whispering while we stood there enjoying the moment. I realized she had used her abilities to peek in the minds of her classmates and had found a great number of the girls in her classes were jealous of her. At first she had felt upset and threatened by the number of girls who would love to take her place, but then it sunk in. She accepted she was special, but not for the reasons I had given her all this time. She knew we shared something in common that none of those other girls possessed. Telepathy, and even more importantly to her, the sight for the symbols which she knew even most telepaths didn't have.

"We were meant for each other, weren't we?" she thought to me.

"I'd like to think so," I replied. "My love, please don't let it go to your head. Always remember what it was like before you could read the thoughts of others. Remember when I said I was proud of you?"

"Yes. You said I always thought about others before myself."

"Something like that, yes. Oh baby, it's so important that you never lose that. Everyone has the right to live their own lives, to be their own person. Not everyone believes in this, but I do, and I want you to too. It's like at the heart of my being, the thing that makes me who I am. Do you understand?"

"Yes... " she thought to me before kissing me on the chest and giving me a hug.

Once we both had recovered from our little private exchange, we got down to business. Jennifer absolutely amazed me with her talent concerning the symbols. You see, instead of showing her how to make people think or do things she wanted, I started out doing just the opposite, and that was how to undo that sort of thing.

The idea basically came from the karate classes I never personally took. The first thing you learn is how to fall without hurting yourself, so I figured I best teach Jennifer how to take her falls by showing her how to undo anything she might accidentally do by mistake.

This truly was where she had a clear advantage over me, however. I tried to explain how the commands felt inside a person's mind, and after patiently listening to my descriptions, she asked me to demonstrate it. When I altered one of the girls significantly by making her think she was a frog, Jennifer not only undid the frog commands, but the commands I had used to undo the damage Scott's eight grade history teacher had done.

I was so shocked that I had her do it again, and learned that she could see or otherwise sense what the streams of a person's mind were supposed be in their natural unaltered state.

Actually, she later clarified it to be more like smoothing out the streams to a more natural appearance, admitting she couldn't really know for sure what their original minds had been like and just made the streams of symbols flow in an order that seemed as natural as her own, knowing that she had never been altered herself. This clarification came out when I realized the three girls should have lost their intense desire for giving head if Jennifer had restored them to their pre-Underwood state of mind.

I allowed Jennifer to take her shot at fixing one of the girl's fixation on giving blow jobs, and to my amazement and somewhat disturbance, she did so without leaving any trace of tampering.

There were some side effects, however. The largest came to the fact that Jennifer hadn't affected their memory in the altering of their thought processes. If I hadn't felt one of the girls feeling disturbed about her blow job experiences, all three of them might of left there with a psychological time bomb ticking in their heads.

So Jennifer did have quite a bit of learning to do, and I was glad to find her accepting the fact that manipulation of the symbol streams was not the absolute answer to every problem.

Over the next three days, Jennifer's confidence and knowledge grew at a rate I never would have believed. Everything which I explained or described to her was in the terms of how I knew it best which boiled down to commands and sensations. Jennifer used these to guide her in learning how to do it from the symbols and their streams point of view, and while we differed on the implementation, Jennifer managed to work it so the resulting "footprint" as I called it was the same and easily detected and removed by myself or any other experienced telepath.

I was very please with her and myself when she admitted that sensing for the commands other's had inserted into a person's minds was a better way to find and remove them rather than blindly "smoothing" the streams out by removing groups of symbols and inserting others that gave the stream a... well, smoother look.

I admit I learned a considerable amount myself, for I had never grasped how important the placement of the symbols were in a stream, and how they affected other streams as well. Heck, I still don't fully understand it, and I've been studying them for nearly ten years now.

Friday after school we met upstairs as usual, but this time instead of having some of Underwood's graduates from his cock sucking school, I had brought some of my dad's slaves in hopes of this being the best way to introduce her to my parents' activities.

"Jennifer, I would like for you to meet Carol, Vicki, and Korben."

"Hello," Jennifer said politely before looking up at me with a confused expression.

"Honey, before you look in their heads, you should know that even though I would never do this sort of thing to anyone myself, I've had to accept that I can't force others to live by my rules, or see things the way I see them. If I did, I'd never get any peace, and there would be a good chance that I would be made like them at some point."

"I don't understand," she said before gasping from her initial probes.

I had to lead her over to the recliner after she had almost fallen over while becoming so absorbed in scanning Carol's mind that she wasn't paying attention to her body anymore. I felt her move on to Vicki's, then suddenly gasped again and then looked at me with an expression that told me she had found a memory that contained me.

Her empty eyes filled with unshed tears as I watched her in deep concentration. I expected her to try and undo the deeply embedded enslavement commands at any moment, but she didn't and just moved on to Korben.

Korben was actually one of my mom's, and he was the only one of her slaves who she had altered beyond what enslavement had called for. Korben was a convict who's three life time sentences without parole had made him a somewhat willing participant in an experimental program involving reconditioning war time vets with psychological problems to be more productive and receive more hospitable living conditions in return.

The program was actually a front for one telepath's idea of reducing the number of innocent people being enslaved while at the same time reducing the number of prisoners that would otherwise simply rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

The new and improved Korben had no memory of the training or the hell he lived through in Vietnam, and as far as he knew he had served my mother since the day before he had been shipped to boot camp at the age of eighteen. My mom had been pretty thorough in constructing fifteen years of memories, but yet Korben didn't act natural, slave or no slave. Oh, there were some physical factors such as the damage done from fifteen years of smoking a number of different drugs and the time he had been shot in the head in Nam, but these were simply challenges to overcome for an experienced telepath, for the most important aspect to enslavement was what you used as the primary motivator.

Okay, so you can turn them into zombies, or robots, or simpletons who just don't know any better. But doing that removes their creativity and a significant portion of their humanity, so most people prefer slaves who are more or less themselves except driven to obey and serve by some motivator instilled by the enslavor.

Korben had all the classical motivators, plus some of the more exotic ones, and I had even developed one of those myself when I realized he was miserable and needed help. Pleasure, pain, love, hate, those were the favorites, and ninety nine percent of the people out there who have been enslaved by a telepath are motivated by one or a combination of these four.

The problem with Korben was his life had sucked so bad that the four primary motivators simply didn't really work very well, and even my jury rigged fantasy dreamstate which gave him seven hours a day of living a life of his liking didn't drive him to serve his functions, so for the most part he was one of those robot zombies.

Anyway, his mind was so deformed from his life and the changes made by who knows how many telepaths that he simply was unable to function without someone else's direction or running the risk he would go berserk and kill anyone he could get his hands on.

But while I was selecting the slaves to show Jennifer the night before, I recognized what Jennifer would have called juttiness in Korben's streams of symbols. I hoped that Jennifer could fix him, and as she examined the terribly malformed streams of symbols seemingly clunking about his head, I felt her compassion surge and knew she had decided that she would fix him whether I wished her to or not.

As I felt her return her focus to her regular senses, I smiled and stroked the side of her face before seeing she wasn't sure she like that right then or not.

"Why?" she simply asked a bit shakily once I had removed my hand from her face.

"You'll have to be a little more... "

"Why are you showing me how... Horrible your family is!" she said, getting upset.

"Because you would have to see it sooner or later, and I felt it was... "

"How could anyone... That one... Carol. She knows nothing but... but... sex! How could anyone be so cruel, so heartless... "

"I know, Jennifer. Please calm down and listen to me?"

"No! I trusted you! I believed in you! But... You had SEX with her! Both of them! You've used them like they were your... your... things!"

She was losing it, I was certain of it, and I couldn't let her lose it completely if I was going to keep her faith in what I was teaching her. So I grabbed her by the sides of her face and forced her to look at me, then flooded her with my feelings once the empathic connection formed.

Jennifer was terrified for a moment, for I had never forced myself on her in any way before. But as her emotions began to echo my own, I gently let up on the intensity until I no longer was flooding her with my desperate need for her to understand.

Once we reached that point, she slowly brought her hands up to mine, then found the energy to swiftly break my hold on her head.

"I'm sorry I had to do that, baby," I said sincerely. "I didn't see any other way of keeping you from... "

"I can't believe you did that," she said softly yet firmly. "No one has ever... "

"Jennifer, please look at me and listen to what I'm saying?"

"Why should I?" she said, purposely avoiding my eyes. "You'll just do that thing again to me... "

"Jennifer, have I ever lied to you? Have I ever harmed you, or broke my word to you? Well? Have I?"

"No... " she said pitifully.

"Then trust me and look at me now. <sigh> I'm not doing this to hurt you, but to show you why I have allowed and lived with slaves like these three. Yes, I'm going to use my empathic abilities again, but Jennifer? It's the most honest and harmless way I know to show you."

Slowly she turned around, and when she finally did make eye contact with me, all I did was smile and waited. She relaxed and eventually smiled back a little, then turned her head to her left as she pressed herself against me, laying her head against my chest and waited for my arms to wrap around her before letting out a sigh of relief.