Part XXI - 6: A Lover, A Dreamer, That's me

"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.