“I reckon we got ourselves a rat,” Carl says, venom dripping from his voice. “And we all know what to do with them mangy little shits, don’t we, boys?”
A murmur of agreement rises up from the residents directly around Carl, and you see them tighten their grip on their weapons. Before they can bring them up to bear, Frank gets between you and Carl, right in the way of his aim.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Frank tells him. “Now put your damn longarm down.”
“You seriously don’t see what’s happening here? Your city scav friend shows up, and suddenly there’s a massive attack from them damn city gangers the very next damn day! That ain’t any kind of coincidence, Chief!”
“I do see what’s going on, and I got my own thoughts on that. But what you don’t see is that Nomad here fought them gangers on our side. If it weren’t for them, we might still be fighting even now.”
Carl grits his teeth as hears Frank rebut him. You sense him heat up as he gets more and more aggravated. It seems the last thing Carl wants is to be confronted, or at least for you to be defended.
“In fact,” Frank continues, “If Nomad here’s on their side, they woulda killed us all in our sleep rather than hit us in broad daylight. Coulda taken us down from the inside first, killed me for example. And that woulda softened up everyone else for a surprise attack at night. You see what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah, well you know what I see?” Carl retorts. “I see a damn old fool too trusting of any random scavenging bottom feeder you come across.”
“And all I see is an aging man gettin’ soft in the middle but real hard against everything else. Not everyone’s your enemy, Carl. Not everyone wants you dead. If you keep thinking that, then you’re gonna end up having no-one at the end.”
You sense Carl’s anger rise even further, even though Frank is doing his best to calm the situation down. He begins to shake and quiver as his face turns a little brighter with rage.
“Know what I think now,” he says through gritted teeth, “I think you’re in on it. You’re helpin’ the gangers for whatever reason. Maybe you’re in it for the cash, or maybe you just wanna see some of us get killed. Well I ain’t havin’ none of that now.”
Frank is utterly stunned at Carl’s accusation, so much that you sense his thoughts tumble around in absolute disarray. He simply can’t make heads or tails of his words - they’re such a logical leap that it’s literally mind-boggling.
Carl readjusts his aim, and instead points his rifle right at Frank’s head. The act shocks almost everyone around you. A handful immediately raise their weapons in Frank’s defense, and point their weapons reflexively at Carl. But his posse returns the favor in kind, and raises their weapons up at them in response.
You sense everyone’s nerves shoot sky high as a result. Everyone’s fingers quiver on their triggers, ready to tear each other apart at a moment’s notice.
Chris, the Telekinetic psion, sidles even closer towards Carl. Though his thoughts and emotions about you are relatively unsure, you sense his distrust rising steadily. His own animosity rises up the more he thinks about you, even as he begins to spin up some of his energies. Clearly, he’s prepping to attack you alongside the others.
“I’m with Carl,” he says. “I just don’t quite trust some outside psion in our town. ’Sides, if the Mayor says you’re rotten, then it’s gotta be true.”
“What in the hell is going on with you?! With everyone?!” Nance yells out. She walks over to Frank’s side, and pleads with everyone else to calm down. “We can’t be doing this to each other! We’re practically family! And Nomad here’s been nothing but helpful - sensed their energies all through the fight, and they took down plenty of them gangers. Way more than you or me combined, Chris!”
But her words are hardly heard, and everyone tightens their grips harder instead.
“Whoa, let’s just take it easy now,” Frank says as calmly as he can. Though his weapon’s at his side, and his voice is as even as possible, you know that his emotions are practically rioting. He wants nothing more than to give in and start firing, to rid the town of Carl and his people. It would be easy enough for him to do, and you sense that he could consider it as a service for the community.
You can just about see his thoughts dance about in his head, taunting him as the moments pass. Thankfully, he has the strength to keep himself cool, even despite all those guns pointed at his head, threatening him with oblivion.
“We never did get along much, you and me,” Frank continues talking to Carl. “But like Nance said, we’re still part of the town. It takes both of us to keep it running smooth and safe. Everyone here has. And all of us here gave blood for each other all through our lives. Let’s not spill what we’ve given just ‘coz our heads are gettin’ a little too hot.”
Although Frank does his best to be diplomatic, Carl has long since stopped listening to him. All those words accomplish is to make him angrier and angrier. Unreasonably so. It rises with every word that gets spoken, as though each one is an insult laced within another insult.
When it hits a fever pitch, you realize that you have to do something. If things keep going like this, everyone around you is liable to die. Sure some of these people might deserve it, but the rest don’t. They’ve all just gone through a traumatic event, and don’t need more on top of it. No-one needs their friends and family turning their guns on each other. That’s a kind of cruelty reserved only for the lowest common denominator.
Not even wild animals do that to each other.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
You have no choice this time but to remove your self-imposed limits and unleash your energies. With everyone here running hot, you don’t have a choice but to do so. You just don’t have enough energy to deal with all of them as you are now.
Chris, Nance, and the Mayor are immediately beset with awe as you open up, as your psionic energies fill the space around you, as your temper fills the air. Although a moment ago Chris was ready to join Carl and was spinning up Telekinetic energies, his enthusiasm falls flat quickly. He practically stumbles down on his ass as he backs up out of dread.
Simply, your psionic energies far overwhelm his, and sensing what you’re truly capable of brings him to the ground.
With a powerful Scan, you dig deep into everyone around you, to get a sense of their psyches. And more importantly, to uncover just what the Mayor is hiding. And you find that she is certainly much stronger than she seems - part of her energies are still masked from you.
But it hardly matters now. What matters is that something is driving a wedge between the people in this town, and you’ve somehow become a focal point for that divide.
And it’s here, in this moment, that you realize that something else is happening here. Something much larger than you, or this entire town. It’s beyond the Mayor wanting to hide her true nature, beyond Carl’s inability to let go of his anger, beyond whatever else might be heating up under the surface.
You can just about feel it tugging and tearing at the residents around you, slowly and surely ripping them apart. It reminds you of the Conductor, and how it manipulated the frenzied Crazed. But this feels far more subtle, far more insidious. It’s something that has taken root and worked its way into the residents’ hearts and minds for a long time. Perhaps for years, since the end of the world.
Tensions are high and everyone is ready to shoot everyone else. You sense their fingers tightening on their triggers, even as Carl’s bottomless anger tips over the edge past his limits. You get a whiff of a sliver of glee mixed somewhere in his emotions, which his whole posse mirrors as well. It’s almost as though they want to open fire on everyone else around them.
You immediately pulse outward with a strong Surge, one filled with hesitation and reluctance and indecision. It sweeps over absolutely everyone around you, overwhelming them temporarily with a deep sense of doubt.
Though it isn’t quite powerful enough to shake them completely free, it is enough to extend everyone’s hesitation. Those with their fingers poised to shoot instead relax to some degree, enough to stave away death for a few moments more.
This is far from enough, of course. All you’re doing is delaying the inevitable, and you need to do something else to end this madness. Or at least, long enough so you can get away from it.
The absolute next thing you do is fire up your Network to its fullest potential and connect Frank to it. Not just Frank, but those who are aligned with him such as Nance and the fire team that fought alongside you. Though most aren’t psionic and can’t benefit from your energies directly, they’re still affected by your abilities to some degree.
Just like the Orchestra you had created with the Watch, you link your allies to each other, bolster their minds and bodies, and unite them from a metaphysical standpoint. Equally as important, by being in your Network, they become somewhat immune to your Surge, and recover from its effects far faster than Carl and his people.
However, you don’t create an Orchestra. No matter how much you want to truly unite your allies and turn them into an unstoppable army, you simply can’t. Having them kill their own people would only cause serious trauma to develop in them.
Frank is already at the edge of his ability to cope with all this, and him pulling the trigger on someone would only break him completely.
No, you have to do this another way.
Instead of sharing your Foresight through your Network, you step into it. Rather than experiencing the numerous slivers of the future build themselves into your present, you split up and instead meet the slivers moments before they join.
On top of that, you activate your Temperance and push your perception and synapses to their absolute maximum. You accelerate your own thoughts and cause your neurons to fire hundreds of times faster than normal, all within that infinite moment in time.
And in doing so, you experience the world through fractions of a second, just as the slivers form into the now. The world seems to slow down all around you, on every level possible. Everyone seems frozen in time, and are practically still like statues. But they haven’t become slow, of course. You’ve only become much, much faster. Or at least, your thoughts have.
To be specific, you create a new combination power - Temporal Acceleration. And by unleashing it on yourself, you find yourself able to think and perceive far faster than everyone else around you.
It’s there that you begin the third part of your attack, one that will hopefully end this deadly standoff. You start off with the most aggressive and unstable of everyone around you - Carl. Of all the people here, he’s the one you need to concentrate on the most.
So you gather up your energies and inject him with a potent Interrupt. But instead of Stopping him, which would most certainly kill him, you instead mirror your headache and reflect it onto his own mind. It immediately takes hold of him, and his biological functions echo your own - at least in terms of pain. The sheer amount of it puts his mind into disarray.
And then do the same with the next person down the line, and send a truly painful Interrupt straight into his mind and body. You also do the same with Chris and the Mayor, and infuse the two of them with as much crippling pain as possible. Then you make sure to Interrupt everyone even remotely aligned with Carl, and inject them with your own brand of pain.
Once you’ve Interrupted everyone you need to, you step out of your Foresight and return to the present.
You’re beset with a massive headache the moment you do - using that much energy in such a short amount of time compounds the pain, sharply. And because you’ve mirrored it into your opponents, they too feel that same crippling pain course through their heads.
You grip your head and groan as you shake it off, having been used to these attacks for years now. It overwhelms your sense for a few moments, causing your vision to blacken and fade. It’s certainly more than enough to bring you to the edge of consciousness, just like all those years ago when you suppressed the Shadow Sweeper. Thankfully you’re able to remain standing and conscious, even despite the ringing in your ears and the fading of your sight. The headache is still exceedingly painful, and you vow to yourself to never do this attack ever again. It’s simply unbearable.
Your opponents however, can’t handle it in the slightest. You’re able to manage it well, sure. But they haven’t ever experienced a pain of this magnitude in their lives. Carl immediately drops his weapon and screams in pain as he clutches his head. He falls down on his knees a moment later, then falls flat on his face, knocked out by the agony of it all.
His posse suffer similarly, with a few writhing around for a few extra seconds before they too succumb to the searing headache and fall unconscious. Chris is immediately overwhelmed, and crumples to the ground without so much as a peep. His eyes simply roll to the back of his head and all goes dark for him.
The Mayor is the last to fall of everyone, and it’s clear that she does her best to fight against your Interrupt. But the pain is too much even for her, and she too goes out like a light and topples to the ground like a felled tree.