When Jason next awoke, it was a familiar setting to a certain extent; a hospital room. A private one, like the one after he'd discovered powers, not the sort of facility where there was just a curtain between himself and the next bed, like the first few he'd ended up in.

He wasn't in any amount of pain at all; whatever injuries he'd sustained from the roll off of his bike must have been less severe than he thought. No way in hell they'd bring a healer for him again after last time.

Well, there was a certain level of discomfort; his hands were each cuffed to the bedframe beside him, and his feet in turn cuffed to the posts at the end. And... he wore a metal collar around his neck. He couldn't see it, but he was about ninety-nine percent certain it was precisely the same sort of explosive collar that he'd used to secure metahuman prisoners back in the desert.

Good, reliable, Control Collar Mark 5. Quarter-pound shaped charged aimed at the victim's throat, a stungun aimed at the victim's spine, able to be remotely controlled and detonated, and, of course, it had two tamper thresholds; level one would just cause it to blare loudly, deafeningly, and stun you til the battery died. Level two would cause it to detonate.

Nobody could suppress mutant abilities; the idea of a single device working on every mutant was absurd; two mutants would likely be more different from each other than they were from ordinary humans. But people could still be killed or stunned, for the most part, if they acted up.

Looking around the room, he could see a heart monitor, an IV.... he was wearing a simple paper gown.. and... of course, there was a man seated at the foot of the bed, a dour, grim-faced man who was vaguely familiar. At the moment, he was looking at his phone, rather than at Jason, until a loud beep sounded... and he glanced up.

"Ahh, we're awake. Good morning, mister Bennet. I've got good news and bad news for you."

Ahhh. Hiller. The same Verification agent who'd been there testing his powers. "Well. Whats the bad news?"

"The bad news is that the state of Nevada is a death penalty state, and that you committed a minimum of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder against one of the witnesses of that crime. The amount of evidence against you is truly excessive. We have yet to connect you with complete certainty to most of the other crimes, but frankly I suspect the prosecutor won't bother; in the unlikely event you aren't convicted and executed here in Nevada for pre-meditated murder, you will instead be executed for treason."

"Well then. What's the good news?"

"If you give a full and faithful accounting of events leading up to today, provide information about your criminal associates, and how you managed to do what you did, I'm prepared to offer you life imprisonment instead. You can save yourself."

Jason gave a slow nod. "I'm going to need to see any agreement in writing and go over it with my lawyer before I say anything." In order to sign such an agreement, he'd need a pen, and a hand with enough reach to get to the document. If you knew how they worked, all you needed was two metal rods and... well. The ability to survive a fair amount of pain... to get these collars off.

"This agreement ends when I leave this room. Every moment you aren't being transported to prison is a tremendous waste of government resources. My director has insisted that Spike remain on-hand to contain you in the event you escape, despite you obviously being harmless without weapons."

"Then I guess you better get that agreement over to my lawyer before leaving the room, or take it as a no."

Hiller glowered down at Jason. "You assault a couple of cops, go on the run, murder one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known while robbing a bank, go on a murder and killing spree across multiple states and maybe even in mexico if I'm hearing it right. You get a chance to survive instead of being sent right to hell as you so richly deserve, and you aren't jumping on it?"

Jason shrugged. "Your loss. Honestly, there's a serious threat to national security ongoing right this moment. I might not have been in the best relationship with the law for the past week, but your boy Spike there prevented me from dealing with a threat to not just america, but possibly human civilization as a whole. And... I'm not certain whether it can be dealt with now. But I am certain that I won't tell you about it until you get me my lawyer, and you get me a deal to sign. And just to be clear... anything I tell you will strictly be about my own, personal actions. I will not name any associates other than Valkyrie. You already know better than to screw with her."

Hiller stared at Jason for a moment... and shook his head. "Idiot." He stretched out in his chair, and made a show of dramatically stretching as he slowly walked to the door, as if he expected Jason to change his mind... And slammed the door behind him.

***

"Whatever the fuck he's talking about, its either the truth, or he at least genuinely believes its the truth." Hiller set his phone down on speaker on the table in front of him. Spike settled in on the opposite side; the prisoner was visible on a monitor beside them, seeming relaxed enough at the moment.

Hundreds of miles away, in his own office, Director Thomes rested his head on his hands, rubbing his eyes. "I got a call in from Greece. From the Pantheon. They requested that I delay taking in Eyeball by precisely ten minutes. Told me that there was a threat to the future of the planet that they couldn't go into too much detail on, but that would be averted just a few minutes after we caught him if we let him deal with it. I told them that unless they gave me more intel, they could pound sand."

He gave a long sigh. "A few miles away from where we captured him, we found an abandoned truck, four almost unidentifiable corpses with truly horrific wounds, which had clearly died in very terrible pain from something burrowing inside their flesh. Normally, I'd be disgusted. We'd be doing a manhunt looking for a meta; either human, animal, or alien. In context of what the Pantheon said, I am now fairly certain that we're dealing with a potentially existential crisis. I'm sending in everyone we can spare to start the hunt, but we need to know exactly what we're hunting for.

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He leaned back in his chair. "I am officially declaring this a national emergency and authorizing use of a telepath to extract information from the prisoner. He's on his way now. And.... Call up Valkyrie. See what she wants in exchange for her help if this goes sideways."

Hiller slapped his fist on the table. "Sir, you know what this means for prosecuting him. He was army, they train to resist telepaths, so it might take a while. And... the moment a telepath touches him..."

"Let him know whats on the way. Maybe fear of that will help put him in line."

***

The moment Hiller left, Jason quietly slipped the IV out of his arm; the slight pulling of his arm-hair a non-issue; and carefully used it to pick the lock of his right hand-cuff. He could feel it; if he did it just the wrong way, the needle would break. He had to do it precisely.... there. Right. He could hear the clock. The cuffs were still on, but appeared to be intact.

He was reasonably certain he could do the same thing to the other cuffs, and to his feet... it would take more than a few seconds, so he couldn't be completely certain... but the IV needle wouldn't work for the collar. He needed two things. A couple of pens, or scalpels, or anything would really work that was at least five or six inches long, solid, and thin. He took stock of the room around him. The IV stand might make a good club in a pinch, but it wouldn't work for picking a lock or opening the collar.

Before he could assess further, the door opened again. Everything still looked good; someone watching closely enough on the camera would've spotted something, but hopefully he was fine.. so far.

Agent Hiller crossed his arms, standing at the door. A nurse; at least Jason assumed it was a nurse; a tall, bearded man wearing dark blue scrubs; stood beside him with a syringe. "New plan. Either you talk, or we drug you into unconsciousness until a telepath comes in so Spike can get back to work... and once the telepath is here... he can contain you himself."

Jason laughed. "You realize that it would actually be faster to do this the right way. Fill out the paperwork, call my lawyer, email it to him, and just... get me to sign. And the fact that you're so hesitant to do that means you have no intention of taking the death penalty off the table; you're just doing what pigs do. Lying, cheating, and bullshitting to try to get a confession. Well, congrats. I asked for my lawyer. Anything you manage to coerce out of me now will be inadmissible."

Hiller chuckled. "That would matter if your trial weren't a foregone conclusion. No... we have all the evidence we need. What we want is information. And you can give it to us... or we can take it."

Jason nodded as he glanced at the nurse. "Well. I guess its time to drug me, then, so our resident pet Titan can stop babysitting me. I look forward to matching wits with whatever telepath you can conjure up."

***

Telepathy was one of those sorts of powers that scared the hell out of most people. Being able to read minds, and influence them? In extreme cases, even control them like puppets? Popular media was filled with movies full of mind controlling monsters leading armies of unwitting lackeys. The reality was a bit more complicated than that. No two brains were alike; no two people thought exactly the same. Pheremone influence was far more common.

A telepath could essentially 'see' the patterns of electromagnetism in someone's brain. Some could then reach in and alter those patterns. For a fresh telepath, who'd never used their powers before? The only thoughts that would make sense would be a twin, or someone very similar to themselves, who thought in similar ways. It took years of training to be able to read the average person's mind; and even more to be able to influence it. Even then, usually, influencing was a matter of either just directly overriding nervous impulses to the body... or literally altering what they think to fit a given pattern.

In the military, soldiers were given a course in mental resistance during basic training; essentially, how to avoid telepathic control. It mostly involved a sort of stream-of-consciousness constant change of what you were thinking to irrelevant nonsense, reliance on muscle memory rather than obeying whatever thoughts happened to enter your mind; and generally trying to avoid the sort of patterns that would help people get a read on you.

Just things as simple as thinking about the telepath's appearance would be a good start, or the room you were in; a good telepath could use things like that to rapidly build up a picture of your mind; and get to work on sorting things out, forcing you to think along lines you didn't want to.

When Jason started waking up from the medication, at first he was half dozing, unaware of his surroundings.. until he spotted the woman sitting in the chair, staring at him. Red hair, green eyes, short, curvy, wearing a nice green dress... when he met her gaze, she smiled.. and his thoughts flashed back to his last conversation.

Well, shit. This was the telepath. If he could just knock her out in the first few minutes, before she really got a read on him, he might get something done. But it would take him time to get free, and someone nearby had to have the collar controls. He was well and truly... Huh.

He felt something, under his left hand. A thin metal handle, a sharp blade.. A... scalpel? When did he get that? And under his right... a metal cylinder of some sort. It was familiar... if he picked it up and looked at it, it would be obvious. A lockpick. You push the button, and a tiny metal hook emerged.

Ahh, Ripper, That glorious bastard. He couldn't sneak Jason out, but sneaking a lockpick in? And if the weapon he used was a scalpel, something there were probably dozens of nearby, they might never realize someone on the outside had helped him. They might even start suspecting their own nurses, and guards. Or this telepath. Perfect.

With the two of them... he could remove the collar. Remove his restraints. And if Spike was gone, and they assumed this telepath and the collar would be enough to manage him for now... well. His best opening was right now.

The cute redhead's smile turned to a frown. She didn't like what she was seeing. She hadn't even started asking questions, getting a good picture of how the subject thought... but the neural activity was insane. It was as if he was processing hundreds of times as much information as he should be. His IQ from testing pre-military had been in the 80s. This was the sort of mind she'd seen in mad scientists, people with multiple personality disorders; the hardest kind to control and read.

She was so busy focusing on his mind that she didn't even notice at first when Jason casually unhooked the cuffs from his right hand, and brought the lockpick over, just as casually snapping the left one free. It wasn't until Jason let out a groan of pain as he forcefully jammed the lockpick and the scalpel between his spine and the collar, lining them up precisely... and causing the collar to pop open with an audible click... that she leapt up from her chair.

As she turned for the door, swiping her keycard to open it in order to escape before the lunatic could free himself, she didn't see the collar, now dripping with Jason's blood, hurled at the back of her head as a projectile... she just fell to the floor in the now-open doorway, completely unaware of his work at freeing himself from the cuffs on his legs.

He was out of the restraints. He had an open door to his cell... and he had a security badge, a weapon... and a hostage.