Chapter 2: The Harrison Group

May 23rd - July 5th, 1990

I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise to find the Group fighting off another voice after all the attention Central State had received about the deaths and the cover up. But I hadn’t expected it, and quite frankly, I was annoyed by the fact I had to drive around the campus the long way just to stay out of the way.

By the time I reached my apartment, I had realized there was more than just a single voice involved in the attack. In fact, as I studied the scene from the roof of the apartment building across the street from mine, I came to the conclusion there were three different factions fighting each other and the Group all at the same time. One group of four voices was apparently retreating while defending themselves from both the Group and a six voice faction, and a two voice faction was attempting to use some of the local mutes to distract them all by making them rush towards the six member group with any weapon they could find.

The Group was holding their own, but I quickly counted only seven active voices within the medical center, one being Joey’s familiar pattern of swirls dishing out a complex blanket command over some approaching hostile mutes that knocked them out for a while.

I carefully checked the attackers’ swirls to make sure they weren’t just Group members performing some kind of drill, then asked myself, Where’s the hell is the rest of the Group?

Seeing there were only a total of twenty or so voices involved, and a third of them I assumed were friendly, I felt relatively safe as I headed towards the medical center to ask if they would like some help.

<Tim?> Joey thought to me just as I entered the newest lobe of the campus. <What are you doing here?>

<Just thought you might like a little help, > I thought back while sensing a hostile mind probing for mine.

<Hurry up and get in here, > he thought to me before closing the connection.

The two voices who were surprisingly holding off at least five others found me despite the link closing before they could get a firm fix. They probed for my mental barrier, tested its strength with some command streams, then hesitated when I hadn’t done the same to them. I imagine they would have just left me alone at that point if the other two factions hadn’t noticed their probes and took an interest in me as well.

Suddenly all four sides were scrambling to keep the other three from claiming me. I had to defend my mind from some rather pathetic attempts to enslave me to one of the three attacking factions, but besides that minor annoyance, I rather enjoyed the symbolic fireworks display they were shooting off in my honor, so to speak.

My entertainment was interrupted when another voice I hadn’t detected before suddenly attempted to take control of my arms and legs, momentarily disrupting my balance and spilling me onto the ground.

Without even thinking about it, I locked on to the man’s mind, felt out the weakest point in his barrier, then distracted him momentarily with a burning sensory stream to his crotch before penetrating his barrier and scrambling his cognitive mind enough to render him harmless for a while.

The moment after I did this, I became painfully aware of how every voice on the campus had hesitated a moment before attempting to take advantage of the distraction my reflex action had caused. As I got up off the ground and hurried towards the medical center without even a probe coming in my direction, I cursed myself for having exposed myself like that.

As a couple members of the six-plus-one faction attempted to unscramble their fallen comrade, the four-member faction used that opportunity to disengage completely and run away. The two-member faction seemed intent on taking out the six-plus-one faction, and by the time I was inside the medical center, the six-plus-one faction was faltering under the combined attack of the Group and the two member faction.

“I guess you don’t need any help now, huh?” I asked Joey when I reached the windowed fifth floor room he was in.

“Do you think you can take out those four before they get away?” he asked as he wiped the sweat off his brow while staring out the window with unfocused eyes.

“I can try,” I said, pleasantly surprised, yet with a growing feeling of caution.

“Do it then,” he said without as much as a glance towards me.

Considering they were speeding away in two different directions in two separate vehicles, once I had broken through one driver’s barriers, I had to have Joey finish up disabling the first pair so I could take out the second before I would lose my lock on their minds.

By that time, the six-plus-one member faction was defeated, and the remaining two intruders contacted the Group and called for a truce. The two brave women were only interested in freeing their brother who had been enslaved by the six-plus-one faction, and after they allowed the Group to probe them, Sarah took them for their word and allowed them to leave with their brother and another who had been a friend.

The nine others were not as easily dealt with. Normally the Group freed enslaved voices from their controller and gave them the option to either join them or to leave with deeply embedded controls in their minds to prevent them from remembering anything about the Group or their voice. But with the Inquisitor’s ten voice per campus limit, they couldn’t offer to take them in and help them adjust to a sensible life with voice, and it wasn’t fair to those who had been enslaved shortly after their voice surfaced to make them forget it ever existed.

But that’s what we ended up doing. Yes, I said we. Since I apparently had to be counted as one of the ten voices on campus, I was flabbergasted to learn I was welcome to stay instead of being forced to go somewhere else to make room for a tenth Group member. Naturally, I felt obligated to help out in any way they allowed me to, and Joey and I stretched that to the limits over the next couple of weeks of the heaviest period of attacks Central State had seen to that point.

While I had been in Texas with Brad, the Group met for the last time to give everyone the chance to form their own independent groups elsewhere, stay in the Group at one of the three campuses, a fourth campus they had planned on expanding to that fall, or to go back to a normal life without their voice or the memories of their time within the Group.

Not surprisingly, many chose to form their own self-sustaining groups, for they only had to stay together for a couple of months before they could go off on their own. A few were not given that choice due to their history, and I was shocked to learn Neil had opted to go with the block on his voice and memory like most of my drinking buddies had.

Neil apparently feared Joey might talk him out of it, so he had wrote Joey a letter and had Sarah deliver it once he had been processed and released to go home.

Joey had taken that pretty hard, but he didn’t have much time to think about it as mad power voices from all over investigated the suspicious “pickle hazing” and attempted to enslave the Group and each other.

I was somewhat upset I hadn’t been around to witness how they had silenced their voices and blocked their memories. As it turned out, the Inquisitor had handed that off for someone else to do. (I wouldn’t learn until several years later that the worst cases had a short visit with Kain and his girls at the Keep in Venezuela.)

Joey’s encryption of memory pathways, while useful in hiding memories from the person carrying them and voices unfamiliar with that type of modification, was easily detected by the cleaning methods I and the other voices used.

Thankfully the campus was all but deserted due to the spring intersession classes having been canceled. There were still a few mutes around, but they were mostly faculty and staff who for the most part were not young enough to interest most of the invading perverts. They were still used by some as diversions, but we were getting pretty good at turning this against them when they least expected it.

Cleanup of the mutes during those attacks wasn’t a problem. All the faculty and staff had been prepared with controls allowing for safe modification of their memories without fear of they later recalling them. Those controls were closer to my dad’s than Father Xavier’s methods, and it would be years before I realized why that was. (Wally learned those skills from his mentor Amos.) The controls had some interesting additions I recognized as Joey’s handiwork.

Suzi scared the hell out of us when she called Joey’s pager from a payphone just outside of town without warning. After Joey’s and my experience with Steven, the Group had adopted to always assume the phones were bugged, and so Suzi was very aware of how she was possibly exposing herself by calling his pager like that. But after nearly a week of not getting any word from us, she decided she had had enough and came to join the fight.

Joey and I scrambled to locate her mind for linking, and once we had, we wasted no time bringing her into the fold and letting her take over for others so they could get some well earned sleep.

During a small break in the activity later that day, Joey told Suzi off for risking herself like she had. That was the first time in over a year that Joey had even so much as raised his voice at her, and I think Suzi’s brief tears were more from the shock than what he said, but then he did sort of take his anger out on her and said things he really had no right to say.

Once she had dried her tears, Suzi, being Suzi, put on a determined face and set out to prove Joey wrong about how we didn’t need her help. Over the remaining week as the attacks escalated and then finally tapered off, Suzi impressed me with not just her offensive and defensive telepathic skills, but also how she could predict their moves and use it to her advantage.

Those couple of weeks gave me a new appreciation for the tactics, procedures, and training the Group had developed for these types of situations. At no point did we lose control of the situation, and I accredit that primarily to the high use of teamwork, which virtually every tactic the Group had in their arsenal relied on.

Everyone in the team had a task. Whether it was breaking down the shields of the head voice or defending those who were, you only had to worry about your part and leave the rest to the others. It didn’t matter if you were sitting idle most of the time while someone else was straining themselves to their limit. As long as you performed your job without distraction, the Group as a whole was safe and would eventually succeed at whatever they were doing. In the few cases where someone was being overwhelmed by their task, they simply had to signal to whoever was assigned to back them up to get relief.

I usually got the job of defending the others, mainly due to my symbolic sight allowing me to detect and counter incoming streams before they reached their intended targets. In the past, the people assigned as defenders usually had to attack the attackers themselves to divert attention away from the offensive Group members. Most of the Group members couldn’t effectively shield anyone but themselves at one time, and the ones who could always seriously weakened their own defenses when they tried.

Both Joey and Terrence Wishmaker, the British voice I had dueled earlier that year, could counter an incoming stream when it was directed at them, but they both generally let their telepathic shields take the hit so that they could focus their attention solely on taking out the source. Apparently a lot of time was spent the previous year trying to develop and enhance this, but to Sarah’s dismay, they simply couldn’t use it to protect others without the symbolic sight.

The first time I was assigned as defense was with Joey and Thomas, a twenty-three-year-old Native American with a sharp mind and sharper tongue. After the first five minutes, Joey stood down and eventually curled up in a room for a nap while Thomas waited a good half hour patiently for something to get through before taking my advice and turning on the TV.

Being the Group’s shield was very cool at first. It was showing off in a sense, but this was okay. We all already knew what my limit was from Sarah’s little surprise test in January, and nobody was interested in retesting that, the least being me. And since we were never attacked by more than fifteen voices at once during that period, I was very comfortable in the load I was handling.

After the first week, however, I got very bored with it. While the head voice within a group was usually pretty powerful, the rest were naturally less powerful, and half the time, they were generally pretty inexperienced at working together. They all focused on sending the same single command in synchronized surges which any seasoned voice knows can be devastating to a telepathic barrier, but at the same time, it was so much easier for me to counter that than multiple different complex command streams. The less practiced they were at doing that, the more of an effort it was to counter them because of how they would get out of sync. But even then, it still wasn’t that difficult to handle them all. Once they became that predictable, the challenge was gone, and on more than one occasion, I got so bored with it I fell asleep while the others were mopping up.

Thankfully, Sarah foresaw that the others were probably getting too used to not having the distractions of being attacked while on offensive duty, and switched me over to offense once the frequency of attacks started settling down. I can’t say I ever got bored with offense, but I quickly came to the realization that it was almost a complete waste of my time to assist them in taking out any less than three voices at once no matter how crafty or powerful they were. We were just that good.

I know what you’re thinking. Timmy finally got to show them his stuff and kicked some serious telepathic ass! Sorry to disappoint you there. While I don’t doubt I could have taken out quite a few of the voices we encountered without seriously straining myself, I didn’t do anything more than what was required of me or any other member of the Group.

Speaking of which, I quickly became acquainted with the remaining group members who were, for the most part, the pick of the crop of all the voices in the Group before the breakup.

On the men’s side we had...

Terrence Wishmaker:
A Brit, whose tactics and strength was only matched by his spurts of arrogance. His ideal woman was a mother in her early to mid-thirties, and in his off hours could be found enjoying one of the many divorced or unsatisfied married women who littered the Kenton county area. His nickname was Uncle Terrence due to the large number of children in the area knowing him by that name. Terrence usually only had one slave, and that was mostly just so there was someone watching his home, not for sex.

Thomas Battise:
A Native American male with very fast reflexes and wit, Thomas was considered to be on par with Terrence in the offensive category. He liked his women intelligent, bisexual, and dirty in the mouth when in the sack. Anal sex was his solution to pregnancy prevention. He hated condoms.

Jon Brigley:
Well rounded in both the offensive and defensive departments, Jon was the only group member who enjoyed swapping bodies for sex, other than myself. He seemed to prefer threesomes, and while his cock was the only one, he was pretty fair about getting fucked by it as much as he fucked with it. Out of all the voices with slaves, he modified his women the least but tended to get tired of them fairly quickly. Jon and Thomas would usually combine their harems once a week for a group fuck.

Shannon Baker:
A big time pedophile, Shannon was the main reason all group members were not allowed to enslave anyone under 18 and/or not out of high school. He was extremely sensitive to telepathic activity, which is why he was such an asset to the Group. He could sense out telepathic probes miles away that even I couldn’t detect without specifically looking for them. While he had fair defense capabilities, he couldn’t attack worth a shit, so during attacks, he was usually with Sarah, keeping her updated with whatever was going on and seeking out new threats. The one time I dream walked into his household really disturbed me, finding the women he had enslaved all behaved like preadolescent girls who were just always curious about sex. Pathetic.

Jacob Greenburg:
A big time homophobe and redneck, Jacob was all about tits and pussy and getting as much of them as he can. Extremely powerful defensive abilities combined with a very good collection of offensive attacks, Jacob was easily capable of taking out most average voices by himself. Jacob was also the youngest group member, having only been sixteen when he had attacked the Group the previous year. Because of both his history and his power, Jacob was the only group member who hadn’t been given a choice about staying or leaving, and in fact, his mind had been significantly modified by Sarah in order to make him trustworthy and loyal to the Group enough that he could become a part of the Group.

On the women’s side...

Gina Harrison:
Sister-In-Law to Sarah and the person whom Sarah linked to the most, Gina was useless in terms of defending the Group from anything except possibly an invasion of a homosexual drama brigade. Sarah and Gina’s older sister Denise had spent years helping Gina get her GDA, and prior to moving to California, Denise had managed to help Gina get sufficient certification to become a professor of the drama department at Central State. Granted, Central State didn’t actually have a drama department before that, but the new drama center was a nice addition to the ever-expanding campus faculties. It gave Gina something to do besides looking for fresh meat, and she surprisingly was very professional with her work and never touched her students even after they completed her class. Her lair was below the supposed drama center’s basement, and closely resembled Wally’s own lair beneath the medical center, both in layout and security. Her hobbies included wine tasting, attending craft fairs, and turning innocent straight young college men into bisexual cock whores.

Josephine (Joe) Grant & Kara Briar:
These two twenty-year-old women not only grew up together, but developed their voices together, a sort of female version of Joey and I. Kara was generally more sexually active than Joe, but Joe was definitely the aggressive one, and usually led the way when dealing with enslaving the opposite sex. They were very close, very powerful when together, and always shared their men with each other and never with anyone else. They lived together, and because of that had the largest harem of all the Group members, all of which were male. To keep things interesting, they liked to alter their slaves’ personalities when they became boring, making them aggressive one day, meek the next, turning them extremely innocent, then seducing them and eventually perverting them until they were mindless cocks with legs. After running into one of their ex-slaves one day and my vision of the damned momentarily kicked in, I basically offered my services to clean their slaves when they were done with them. When they refused, I went over their heads and convinced Sarah it was in the Group’s best interest to ensure all retiring slaves were properly cleaned to reduce the chance of drawing attention to them, and of course us. Initially, I thought they were as corrupt as most of the others, but I later realized their alterations of their men were driven by the men themselves to make it more interesting to the two women, and that ex-slave had requested that they leave him with his new fetishes.

Robin Stewart:
Robin was a strange bird. Intensely bisexual yet very private, she wanted nothing to do with anyone sexually if they weren’t under her power. My dream walks into her household were ... Not disturbing, just somewhat distasteful. The three and four-way bisexual action was pleasant enough, but it was always so focused on her will. It’s not that she didn’t attempt to pleasure her slaves, it just didn’t have any intimacy. She would tell them what to do, they would do it and that’s it. Luckily for the guys she was a cum fiend otherwise I imagine they would have suffered from blue balls quite a bit.

The Cabal ordered that the Group could have no more than ten voices residing at each campus, and if you bothered to count the names and then added one more for me, you would have come up with ten voices.

So now you’re probably wondering why Sarah, Joey, and Suzi didn’t count. That’s simple. They weren’t technically voices, especially Suzi. While Sarah and Joey had some telepathic abilities when unlinked, they couldn’t control anything. You may also recall that Stan, Sarah’s husband, was also telepathic. However, when the Inquisitor had tested him, he deemed his telepathic abilities were not much more than parlor tricks and didn’t consider him a true voice any more than Sarah or Joey was. I think he was being easy on him considering Gina was useless. Stan was really the best defensive voice we had due to his shift and illusionary abilities.

And then there’s Wally. While his official residence was actually at Central State, because of Alex, Wally normally spent more time at Northwestern state than Central State and was counted as one of their voices, not ours. While Wally still held all of his weekend gatherings in his lair under the Harrison III Medical Center at Central State, all of his special projects were located at Northwestern State where he stayed during the week. I wasn’t privy to what his special projects were, and I honestly don’t think even Sarah really knew what they all were either. Wally pretty much did what he pleased, mainly because everyone trusted him.

That trust was strained a bit when Wally announced late that June he had adopted a ten-year-old boy and everyone learned he was bringing the boy to his weekend lover’s sessions. The weekend after I heard of this, I dream walked into the boy. Yikes. If Wally ever had a biological son, I couldn’t imagine him being any more like Wally than Terri was. Terri was definitely destined to be gay, and while he didn’t have sexual intercourse with anyone, he most certainly enjoyed watching the others.

After those first two intense weeks of attacks, I generally tried to always be around the ressy house so I could do some of the physical work of setting up an office for taking over Perry’s job.

Perry apparently left Central state the day after I had, and even though the Group realized his absence almost immediately, they didn’t have time to give it much thought with the break up of the Group followed by the waves of attacking voices.

When I learned that Perry was gone and no one had stepped forward to take over, I immediately seized the opportunity to have unrestricted access to the ressies and control over the cleaning process. Even though there wasn’t anyone else left in the Group who was interested in the job, I was still surprised when Sarah just granted my request without a lecture or even a discussion.

The first thing I did was to put flyers out all over campus offering jobs in “helping mentally ill human beings return to a normal life,” splitting the money Sarah had been paying Perry eight ways for eight positions. I didn’t have a great response to that. In fact, only one girl filled out an application, and she didn’t return my phone calls.

So after doing some field research, I used my own money to fix up six of the rooms on the old admin building’s ground floor as a sort of private dormitory and re-divided the funds six ways instead of eight to make the job more attractive. I can’t say people flocked to my door, but between the free room and the better wages, I didn’t have a problem hiring six undergrads to babysit the ex-slaves around the clock.

Part of me despised doing it, but I took Joey’s advice and installed the modified dual persona and rat setup Joey used for Suzi’s toy boys in my employee’s minds, but only to the extent to ensure their loyalty, reliability, and to protect their innocence.

I spent every minute of my free time that June and part of July cleaning the minds of the thirty-eight ex-slaves we had accumulated before and during the attacks, and that didn’t include the ones I cleaned on the spot after defeating a new group of loony voices. Joey helped a little, but he admitted that without the competitive aspect to it, he didn’t find it that enjoyable.

Suzi and I had arranged our summer schedule to where we were in the same classes so we could take notes for each other, study together, and generally cover for each other when one of us missed class for our different reasons at the time. Of course, now whenever Suzi was called away, I was generally called away as well. Whatever convenience was lost there was more than made up for by the strengthening of our friendship from all the time we spent together.

We rarely saw Joey during the week, but Joey and I had watch Thursday and Friday nights together, and on Saturdays and most Sundays, Joey and I would spend the afternoons working on a computer program and database I could use to record and eventually analyze the symbols, their streams, and the complex interactions between them. On Saturdays, we’d have dinner around five o’clock at Joey’s house, then Joey and Suzi would head back to campus for their own time alone.

Joey’s dad had graciously allowed me to park Midge’s trailer in their big backyard, and I ended up spending the night at the Connors almost every Saturday night so that I could fly her in the morning before it would get too hot.

At first, spending those evenings with Joey’s parents while Joey wasn’t there felt a little strange. But Joey’s dad and I did some male bonding when he came out with me one night to do some maintenance on Midge, and after that, I started to feel like I was part of their extended family again like back when Joey and I were growing up.

So you could say I was thoroughly enjoying my time at Central State. Suzi and I were acing our classes together, Joey and I were working together like in the old days, I was gaining a great deal of knowledge and experience in the way the symbolic streams worked, and two or three nights a week I’d experience the sexual exploits of some of my fellow students, leaving me clear of the distractions my loins usually imposed when I wasn’t getting any.

Of course, sharing in people’s most intimate moments did present their own distractions. Many of the lovers I dream walked into were total strangers to me, but there was the occasional classmate, neighbor, or other acquaintance I would see after the dream walk. I naturally had to pretend nothing was different from the last time I had seen them, and after the first couple of times that happened, I got pretty good at it.

But not always. Two girls I had classes with were especially difficult to deal with for their boyfriends were very much in love with them. From my perspective during a dream walk, that meant I was very much in love with them, and the feelings didn’t entirely go away after I woke up. I don’t know what I would have done without Suzi keeping me out of trouble in those classes. Of course, she constantly commented on how hypocritical she was with all of the carnal sex she was having again.

If I hadn’t known it had been Joey’s idea, I would have been very concerned when Suzi started having her toy boys come over every other Wednesdays again ... but without Joey. I suppose I understood he only wanted to give her the chance to experience the solo voice scene. I just hoped she wouldn’t go overboard with her kinky sex. They alternated having the boys over every other Saturday too where Joey was with them.

Anyway, every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and every other Wednesday nights, Suzi and I were always together doing homework, watching TV, playing telepathic hopscotch, or just talking like only two best friends could. No topic was taboo, and we absolutely never took offense when the other didn’t see things the same way, which we very often did.

Suzi just loved hearing my dream walk stories. It was our secret gossip. We spent many a morning in my bed talking about the people and the sex I had experienced the previous night, and it became a regular routine to check in on the lovers telepathically together to see how they were doing the morning after.

One night I dream walked into Jason, Suzi’s older brother, just as he used his well-practiced fuck me look on a girl he had just met three days before. The blush on her cheeks and the slight movement of her thighs meant she was responding very well to his empathic wooing, and with only a few more enchanting smiles and maintaining this vibe he was constantly sending out to her, she agreed to go with him to see his new apartment.