“Run of the mill is an expression which means – Hey, look at me, I work at a mill, aren’t I boring? Or something.” – From Jesse in Missed Conversations, Vol 1.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t present for your awakening.” The giant bat said to Ellie.
“What for?” She asked, taking a sip of her blueberry tea.
“To prevent you from coming to.” The bat replied. The furry chiroptera looked down at his belly and flinched. “I’m a bat.” he muttered.
“Of course you are.” Ellie said. “You’ve always been a bat.”
The great bat sighed and readjusted his monocle - then, with a start, threw the monocle away. “Look, I have to tell you something. And its better for you to know now, in here, than out there where god knows what could happen.”
Ellie took a sip of blueberry beer and pondered the words of her old bat friend. “Well, you’d better make it quick. My dad’ll be home any minute now and he hates bats, terrified of them.”
The bat seemed to dither on its next course of action, as only bats can, until it said: “You remember your father?”
“Remember my… father?” Ellie asked, utterly perplexed by the question. “Of course, I remember him. He’s my dad. The man died before my very eyes. I was eight – that’s not something that’ll wash out.” Ellie said the last, and then found herself quite worried and quite uncomfortable. Something was off about this place and this conversation. “We were talking about something.” She said, brow furrowing in concern.
“Your father.” The bat reminded her.
“My father? Never met him. My aunt raised me, she was a good woman.” Ellie said, then blinked dazedly. “What are you doing in my house?” She asked. Then, after a strong pause in which many a connection was re-formed: “What am I doing in my house?”
The walls fell away, dissipating like smoke, and behind each there stood a strange and muddled portion of an all-encompassing horizon.
“You are in a dream.” The bat said. “I am a psychologist here at the academy, a gifted who can enter dreams. Right now, I’m keeping you under – that is until you give me a reason not to. There are things you must come to terms with, frightful things.”
“What kind of frightful things?” Ellie asked. A storm was coming over the mountains, and Ellie could feel the distant drum of rain, as if the drops were not drops but flecks of metal and glass.
“The first thing I must ask you is this: what are your gifts?” The bat said, voice hard as folded steel.
“I don’t have any.” Ellie said, beneath the curtain of rain that now swept into them. It threatened to drown out the whole conversation. “My eyes glow yellow sometimes. But they don’t do anything-“
“You wouldn’t be here if that were the case.” The bat said. “Now I will ask you again, Eleanor Gable, what are your gifts?”
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“I don’t have any.”
And as suddenly as the rain had come upon them, it fell away. The two stood alone, small dots within the heart of an endless desert.
The bat watched her, eyes narrowing to slits. “You have one, that I know of. And it makes you, at once, incredibly valuable to us as super villains. You are, whether you feel it or not, one of the gifted – and of the Prime order at that.”
"Super villains? My father-"
"Was a villain in training. A prime, like you."
The words had little effect on Ellie, who simply turned on her heel and began walking in the opposite direction. Villains. Of all the bad luck, she'd fallen under the microscope of some syndicate-paid doctor. It wasn't that she minded the criminal class, they tended not to bother normal folk like her. The average person was simply too poor to bother with for most - and in that she could see the truth in many allusions to politicians as villains. Nonetheless, it was one more thing that might complicate her otherwise plain and relatively safe existence.
The desert was large and held many secrets – there were pockets in which one could hide, dark places that blocked the tide of memories as they rose to sweep and capture. Now where to forget? What hole or crag would suit her best?
As she walked, the bat flew alongside, never giving her a moment’s peace. “To be one of the Prime order means to have a gift that no one else possesses, and this is a rare and powerful thing. Only ten of your kind exist in the world today, and I should think it an act of truest fate that the very last Prime to leave us was none other than your late father.”
Ellie stopped walking. At the bat’s words, thoughts of escape fled from her mind, and the outlines of past days, hours and weeks started to resurface.
“My… father? You knew him?” She asked.
The bat landed before her, kicking up sand that folded away from the dreaming girl.
“I did.” The bat conceded. “I knew him as a fellow student at the academy. He was a good and gentle man – I suppose you could say cut from the right cloth but with the wrong pair of scissors. I’m not sure what it would have taken for him to have graduated.”
Ellie didn’t feel like pursuing his words right then, and instead focused on what was most immediate and familiar. “I’m a gifted. But I can’t do anything. I am really good at ignoring people though.”
“I picked up on that, yes.” The bat said, smiling as only a dream would allow. “But that’s not the gift I’m talking about. And here’s the troubling part. I’ll tell you since you’re now fully aware of where you are and what this place is. On October 5th, your train was the unfortunate casualty of a fight between the hero known as Scimitarian and KeelSpawn the - and I’m speaking technically here - ‘villain’.” The bat paused for effect. As if to punctuate his sentence, a train carriage came crashing down from the heavens, and impaled itself upon a nearby outcrop.
The bat continued, unabashed. “I want to make something clear to you, Eleanor. Every person aboard that train died, either instantly upon derailment and impact or within moments after the fact. Which means, unfortunately, that so did you.”
More carriages fell from the sky, throwing up dust and glass and violent screams. “But I’m here.” Ellie said, weakly.
“Yes, you are. Because of your gift. You see, Eleanor, there was – at least for a time – one other survivor of the immediate impact. A young boy named Alex. Technically, a young gifted boy. He was in training to become a hero.”
Ellie remembered the boy’s face, lively eyed and with a smile she now saw to be inescapably honest. She could see him becoming a hero.
“The surveillance tapes that survived the crash show you near a state of death, and the boy administering some last-ditch treatment, before himself succumbing. What our observers found remarkable, after they performed their typical post-disaster infiltration, was that – for all that took place in that carriage – the boy came out of it utterly unharmed. Until he touched your hand, Eleanor, until he looked into your eyes. Until you hollowed out his soul with your very gaze and stepped in to take its place.”