Your psyche is jarred slightly as a group of people enter your perception, just at the edge of your Chakral perception. They come closer towards you in small clumps, and from every direction. Their constant thoughts spike up and splash outwards even as they approach. It’s clear that everyone else in town is coming to the Lodge at Frank’s behest, to discuss the fates of Mayor Lisa, Carl, Chris, and their teams.
So of course, they’re all chattering about it furiously.
And since your physical body is running on minimum power, you don’t hear a lick of it. Instead, you get barraged with a heap of thoughts and emotions from everyone around you, more than enough to interrupt the serenity you’ve found within your Chakra.
It feels like tiny earthquakes striking you from all sides, as though you’re at the epicenter of it all. Though each one doesn’t do much, the greater whole shakes you, vibrates you, unsettles you on every level.
As a result, you peel back your Chakral perception closer towards you, and shape it so it only watches over everything inside of the Lodge. In here, all you can perceive are Frank and Nance’s teams as they watch over their charges. This brings you back to the peaceful and mellow trance you’ve been enjoying thus far. But you know you can’t just leave it at that.
You can’t simply withdraw into some peaceful inner palace blind to the world around you, especially if things go poorly for Frank. For all you know, most of who’s out there lean towards Carl’s usual combative demeanor and that scenario would end really poorly for all of you.
Instead, you reach out to Noir and message her Telepathically, “hey, be my eyes and ears, wouldja?”
She agrees with you, then transmits what she sees and hears and feels directly to you, through the Network. Her raw senses come in slowly, enough for you to control just how much you want to see, and how much you want to hear, and how much you want to feel.
As much as you’d like to experience life directly through her eyes and ears, you can’t. Not right now, anyway. If you devote all of your conscious self to experiencing the world through Noir, you’ll end up ignoring what’s happening inside the lodge. That’s as good as sleeping through it all.
Instead, you set up a kind of theater in your mind. It’s there that you project Noir’s eyesight into a dark corner, and watch as though she’s streaming a live news report. The sounds she hears also come in all around you, or more specifically, stereoscopically. It’s almost like you’re at the cinemas, minus the mumbling couples and the annoying crying child and the rest of the audience, really.
You also dull the sense of touch that she’s sending you. Although it would be nice to feel the wind on her furry body or the grass under her paws, you don’t need that much information. Instead, you bring it down until you can just barely sense what’s happening around her body.
Right now, she’s weaving through the tall grass and you can feel the soft earth compress slightly as she takes step after step. The grass brushes up against her whiskers which seems to softly electrify your cheeks.
All of it combined feels truly delightful.
You watch as Noir continues to pad through the grass forward. As she does so, the chattering of people fills the air ahead of her. The sound around you shifts in various directions, as she angles her ears up and out. As a result, you get a sonic sense of where the cluster of people are, how far they’re standing, and roughly how large the cluster is.
It seems that they’re just around the corner, and that there are numerous dozens of them.
As Noir gets closer to the corner, she looks up constantly, specifically at the Lodge’s upper floor. There’s a wooden balcony up there that sits over top of the entrance and overlooks the Town Square beyond. You sense a rush of Temperance flow through Noir - a very precise amount of it and only for a moment.
It’s within that moment that she leaps upward with absolute grace and without a single sound. She gets up slightly past the banister railing, arcs over very slightly, then lands gently on the railing itself without a hitch. She then drops down to the balcony floor and ambles over to the center of it, close to the edge overlooking the crowd below.
When she peeks, you see the town out there, or at least those who could come out. And there are quite a lot of them. You guess about sixty or so, or about two-thirds of the town? You’re not sure. No matter what, you don’t get a full view as Noir quickly plops down on her side, as cats are wont to do.
You suppose that she does this to maintain the appearance of any old cat. No-one really cares about a cat snoozing in the shade, after all.
Even though you lose sight of the crowd below, her ears angle in ways that you still hear everything they say. One of her ears sounds as though it’s cupped over the balcony floor, allowing Frank’s voice to echo up from underneath.
It sounds muffled, rightfully so. There’s a lot of wood between him and Noir.
“Sorry for calling you all out here in the heat,” Frank tells them.
He seems to be walking back and forth below, but his pace is slow and even, and he stops here and there occasionally.
“But we need to talk about that attack we just suffered,” he continues. “And more about all that’s happened after. Because we all got a decision to make. A real hard one, too. Maybe a few hard ones, all right in a row, I dunno.”
You note that he only speaks after he stops moving, and that his voice booms outward in different directions each time. It occurs to you that he’s addressing the crowd in front of him like any experienced speaker would.
“I see a lot less of you than I did yesterday, and that’s a sight I can hardly bear,” he says after a long pause. “Though I’m thankful that I am seeing as many faces as I am now. I’m sure plenty of you feel that way about those around you.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“We need to do something about them gangers!” shouts someone in the crowd. He’s met with a chorus of agreement.
“I know, I know, and we’ll get to that,” he answers. “First we gotta talk about what happened just after the fight. And I’m warning all of you now that not all of us are gonna like what I’m about to say. That includes me…
“Don’t worry I ain’t gonna beat around and just come out and say it. Carl and some of his boys pulled their guns on me, and on Nance, and on the newest trader, Nomad.”
You hear all kinds of murmurs erupt from around the crowd, though you can’t quite make out everything being said, and all you get are slivers of conversations. Still, you get a sense that people are somewhat split on it, with some saying things along the lines of, ‘I knew something like that would happen,’ and others saying, ‘Well you all musta done something, then.”
You don’t feel surprised in the least, considering all you’ve seen thus far. Whatever this thing is that has divided the town, has done so thoroughly.
“First it oughta be known that the Mayor accused Nomad of leading the gangers who attacked our town. But before you all cry out in support, just know that if it weren’t for Nomad we’d be in a whole lot more trouble, and there’d be a whole lot less of you now.”
Frank is met with a handful of jeers, unable to accept his words. You get the sense that these few are defensive of the Mayor, with one particularly loud one claiming that Frank’s experience is singular, and not that important compared to the Mayor.
But the loud one is quickly rebuked by a dozen or so around him. You can’t quite make what they’re saying, but it’s clear that they’re in support of you. They literally shout at the loud one claiming that Frank’s experience is far from singular. It’s enough to drown him out and shut him up.
You easily guess that they’re the ones who fought at your side. Or rather, you at theirs.
“Let’s all calm down now,” Frank tells everyone a handful of times. Each time he does, people quiet down more and more. Once he has their attention once again, he continues.
“I would believe the Mayor myself, honest to god,” he says. “But the fact is the Mayor’s been lying to me. Maybe to you. Maybe to everyone. It’s a real big lie, too. And I just can’t make out why and what for. Been driving mad thinking about it.
“Anyway, what’s important here’s that the Mayor hid the fact that she’s a psion to me. Not a psion like Chris or Nance, but from what I understand someone way stronger and more capable than them, combined. Probably combined and doubled and then some.”
Frank is met with a chorus of ‘how could she’ and ‘so what’s’ and more critically ‘I didn’t know either’. Their voices rise up sharply, but quickly settle down over the next few seconds. You can’t help but imagine Frank waving his arms at them to calm them down.
“Fact is though, if she’s that kinda powerful and whatnot, why didn’t she do anything in the fight? If anyone saw her fight, raise your hands. I seen Nomad do their thing during our fights. You might not believe me unless you saw it yourself. But it’s like they stunned them gangers from a distance.
“Like, in one moment their faces were angry as they squeezed on their triggers, and in the next they were stumbling around all dizzy-like. We all felt Nomad do it, like through the air. Now I know you don’t take me for no hippy, but I felt it. Others did too. Felt waves of it pass through us, and hit the people we were fighting.
“So lemme ask again - did you see anything like that at all? Did you see the Mayor put herself up during the defense? Anyone?”
Frank pauses, waiting for an answer. Nothing comes but grim silence.
“What I’m basically saying is that if Nomad did stuff that helped us out, why isn’t there anyone here who can say the same for the Mayor?” Frank asks rhetorically. “And kinda leading to that, how can you trust anyone who’s supposed to be leading the town, but doesn’t even show up to fight back when it’s getting hit?
“Y’all remember when the last time the gangers showed up? Was just maybe a half dozen at the time… But where was the Mayor? She weren’t at the front fighting them gangers off, that’s for sure.”
“She ain't supposed to be fighting up front!” someone yells.
“That’s definitely true,” Frank rebuts. “But she oughta be close enough to know what’s going on. She oughta been handling the rear, if you know what I mean. Coordinating defenses, all that. But she weren’t then, and she weren’t now. You trust her to be there if and when all this happens again?”
He gives them another few moments to absorb what he’s saying. You can hear his boots click and thunk softly against the wood, as he seemingly paces back and forth on the porch below.
“Now I’m not sure, and this is just me guessing, or maybe it’s some kind of soldier intuition or something,” Frank goes on. “But I think Lisa did some brainwave psion shit to Carl that made him pull his guns on me, well Nomad at first. But then me. All his boys followed right after.
“And that means, well, I don’t know what that means. I just think we can’t trust our Mayor. Maybe we even need a new Mayor. And maybe the old one’s gotta go at the same time. And we’re all here to figure that out. So now, let’s talk about it.”
All manner of shouting erupts in quick succession thereafter, none of which you can make out at all. You barely catch certain words here and there, but that’s the best you get.
You can just make out Frank’s voice through the din, as he attempts to shout everyone down. He does so, but it takes him a long while - perhaps a whole minute.
“No, no, keep it down back there, thank you,” he says with his voice still loud. But as the crowd in front of him quietens, so does he. “Let’s go one at a time, alright. You, Bill. Old Bill, I mean. Give us your take right quick.”
“Look, I ain’t no fan of the Mayor doing all that, keeping that shit all hidden-like,” says Old Bill. “I don’t rightly care what you all do with her. But I don’t want Carl to get caught up in her… whateveryoucallsit. Psycho-head shit. Far as I’m concerned, he’s done nothing wrong.”
A murmur rises up to agree, even as Frank calls out another person to speak - someone named Annie.
“I think we oughta move to the Fortress like everyone keeps talking about,” she says. “We can leave the Mayor here to rot for all I care. But she ain’t coming. Not if she could brain melt us or something.”
An even larger chorus of agreement comes up to support her, it's enough that it seems like the majority of them out there.
“And what about Carl? And Chris?” adds Frank. “Both their teams trained their longarms at us. They was all meaning to kill, saw it in all their eyes. Can we trust them around us, too?”
“You said yourself that they was just tools to some mind game,” someone calls out. “I say they innocent. They oughta go free.”
A few agree with that sentiment, though many more scoff at them.
“Carl’s always been a shit to everyone,” says another person. “Always got the notion that he was always just looking to put the hurt on someone. Don’t need no mind-control psycho-bitch forcing him into any of that. He’d do it in a heartbeat. I say they all stay here with the Mayor while we head south. They can all go to hell.”
A number of cheers erupt from around him, but an equal amount jeer loudly in protest.
You hear Frank attempting to calm them all down once again, but before he can do anything, you sense something within your Chakra stir. When you refocus yourself onto the Threads around you, you quickly notice that Lisa’s Thread stirs rapidly, as her mind regains consciousness, and as she comes back to her full senses.