15:12. Monday, December 4th, 2023. Harmon Town Hall.
It took forever to get through all of the calls and emails she had to send to make sure she was even allowed to do half of the stuff she talked about with Selectman Sobol. She ended up working through her lunch break. Going through a whole pot before she even started to update the presentations she would need to give. And she hadn’t even done the research yet on the Costume Game.
I shouldn’t have said anything about throwing myself into my work, this is the universe punishing me.
She decided she needed a less brain intensive task to focus on or she would probably end up burning out before Wednesday. She decided she would scroll on Clogger. In Alexis’s mind, Sharebi was for old people and animal pictures/videos, while Clogger was for news and art. It was also an old site, its name literally came from ‘computer log’ and had been designed as a microblogging platform.
The logo was a pair of dancing shoes, but most frequent users frequently called it the Shit Site because the name sounded like clogging a toilet. Alexis also called it the Shit Site even though she was just a lurker.
It worked by letting you separate your feed into multiple timelines, sometimes called just a line. Which Alexis thought was supposed to be a pun on line dancing. Each line had different tags or profiles selected by the user, so that a user could have a line for a fandom they were into or subject they were passionate about.
By default though there was a timeline which contained whatever topics or posts were currently trending, and was simply marked ‘news’. Alexis was currently browsing this one.
Huh, they are making a new adaptation of The Cat. Hope they don’t mess up his character as badly as they did the last time around. Honestly can’t imagine some people would be thrilled about another superhero movie when there are people running around pretending they are real.
The mind numbing act of checking the news let her relax a little bit. But it didn’t take long for an errant post about some leaked photos of the car they were planning to use in the movie for Alexis’s thoughts to return to the events of Friday.
Wow, it is easier to forget that your life may be in danger than I thought it would be.
But there was only one way she could ensure her safety, and that meant figuring out who or what was responsible.
She started by coming up with a timeline of all the strange things that had happened to her since Friday.
On Friday, rocks started to hit my car when I was parked in the parking lot. I stepped out to check the cars around mine for a potential cause when my car door closed on its own. When I walked away, my window shattered. Then the car next to mine was torn apart like it was being clawed at and one of the parts almost hit me.
Today the bathroom door was closed when I always leave it open, my mirror had a crack, and my keyboard broke in half right down the middle with the ‘H’ key seemingly having been pressed.
She boiled down the potential answers to a few different options.
Option 1, I am crazy. She gave this medium odds because there was a chance that at least some of the things were in her head or just misunderstandings.
For example, if the bathroom door closed and the mirror broke for mundane reasons like she thought originally, that meant there was a lot less evidence that whatever caused the events of Friday had access to her home. But this was besides the point, the more pressing question was whether all of what had happened so far was in her head.
She rated this much lower odds, however.
I think I would be more likely to believe someone if they told me that actually it was the past ten years that had been all in my head. I mean psychics are real and I have to go to work everyday? Sounds like a nightmare high school me would have come up with.
If she was having hallucinatory breaks from reality, that didn’t explain how her car window broke though. And she still had the one crack in her front windshield (which she hadn’t paid to get fixed) as proof some of it had happened.
Alexis went to get another sip of her coffee, but realized her mug was empty. But if she went to grab another cup Aabria would probably tell her that Alexis was over doing it and that it was probably best enjoyed sparingly.
She kept scrolling through Clogger with her right hand, but with no coffee to drink, her left hand left to idly play with her hair.
Something she considered earlier this morning, was that maybe something happened to her on Friday that was so traumatic that it caused her to disassociate or something. But it was hard to imagine what she would even do if that was the case. Seek therapy?
So for now she was just going to act as though she only had the mental issues her doctor had diagnosed her as having. This seemed like the safest bet.
Option 2, there is something wrong with my talent. She rated this a lot lower. But the rules governing her talent being in some sort of constant flux could explain why there didn’t seem to be anyone around when weird stuff started to happen to her.
However she felt it was only possible for her talent to radically change like that if she had done something strange with it. And the thing was, Alexis avoided using her talent. Not just because the trigger condition meant she had to be in danger, which she was already uncomfortable with, but that whenever it did activate it brought a lot of traumatic memories with it.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The only thing that was atypical about her and her talent would have been her lack of talent usage compared to the average psychic. There was not a lot of information about what happens when you don't use your talent for a while. There were a lot of articles which suggested that the more you used it the stronger or more versatile it got. But that was probably a quirk in the way scientific news got shared online, because if a study showed not using your talent in a while did absolutely nothing that probably didn’t merit making that many headlines.
Wouldn't exactly gonna get that many clicks.
She decided to research it though, she found a lot of people asking the same thing on this site called Roomr. Mostly it was people asking who were in pretty rare situations. Like having a talent that only affected a specific object where the object was lost or destroyed. Or cases where an automatic talent’s trigger condition was too hyper specific to be usable.
These were just quirks of how awakenings worked in practice. The common example people gave was if you have someone who wants to reach a tall shelf to grab a box of cereal and they awaken their talent. The talent they awakened could take a lot of forms:
- They get general telekinesis, maybe with the strength depending on how hungry they are when they use it.
- They get control over boxes.
- They get control over boxes of new limited edition Choco-nana flavored Yummy Flakes cereal. In which case, they would have to use methods Alexis didn’t quite understand to broaden out the targeting to get it to work on other things too before the cereal ran out of stock.
- They get an automatic talent which has the trigger condition of activating only when something is out of reach on a tall shelf.
- And sometimes they get a talent that works on just that one box of cereal.
Though the consensus on what happens to people in the latter two situations were pretty mixed according to the site she was reading now. Some users claimed that if you didn’t use your talent it would most likely go away, citing the articles about using a talent strengthening it. Technically that’s an inverse error, just because A leads to B, doesn’t mean the opposite of A leads to the opposite of B.
Alexis’s hand began to loosely tug on a knot in her hair, untangling it. She deposited the loose strains next to her laptop.
Others on the post were debunking the first group of users by citing their lived experiences. One user even stated that they went a year of not triggering their talent’s condition and if anything it had seemed stronger. This lined up with what Alexis had experienced on Friday, with the talent deploying to its full effect. The notion that
No one on either side of the argument was claiming that their talent changed after not using it for a while.
She tried to look up why a talent might change on its own, but all the results were about people recommending ways she could ‘5 ways to upgrade your talent today!’ And the articles themselves contained a lot of buzzwords like ‘Anchor Theory’ and ‘Perception Training’, which she had less than no interest in learning anything about. The gist seemed that changing a talent was something you had to deliberately work pretty hard at, not something which could just happen on its own.
The only other thing that would change her talent that Alexis could think of is if she had a second Awakening. But forgetting how unlikely (and cursed) it would be to hit the odds twice, she still could dismiss this out of hand because a psychic always felt it the moment they were awakened.
So for now, this was a dead-end.
Lastly, Option 3, a psychic is behind all this. She rated this the highest odds, because it was clear a psychic was involved in at least the car being destroyed on Friday. Instead of focusing on the question of who like she had earlier, she tried to figure out the how.
So first was the question how she never saw the person.
A psychic being able to bend light to become invisible was within the realm of possibility. She didn’t fully grasp the science of how light hits people’s eyes but she figured it messing with that deliberately was probably too complicated a process for a psychic to do manually, which meant that the talent would have to be automatic.
She could even imagine situations which could awaken a talent like that, like someone desperately wanting to be unseen and awakening a talent that would let them do that.
But she also never heard anyone either. She only ever heard the effects of their actions, like the sound of her car’s window shattering, or the rocks hitting the windshield. This could at least be explained because of the sound of her car’s engine running on Friday, and the sound of the shower this morning, giving them partial cover.
What this didn’t explain though was how they could tear through a car. The way it had even looked was closer to invisible claws or like giant hands mashing clay. Not something a regular invisible person could do.
Her hands began to peel apart a split end in her hair. At some point her leg had also become restless.
The thought that Alexis kept coming back ever since Friday wasn’t invisibility, but that it was just a strong talent with long range. This made the most sense, and could even explain some of her assailant's odd behavior. Like maybe they couldn’t see that well and attacked the car next to hers as a mistake. But if the goal had been to attack her, it wouldn’t make sense why it bothered throwing rocks and locking her out of her car.
Still, the ability being strong but long range made the most sense, even if the exact parameters of it were still unclear to Alexis at this point.
She felt satisfied with that answer, even though that meant there was probably someone either in or near her condo waiting for her. Or who may even potentially be following her.
But with as much uncertainty as she had, locking down the most likely means and method still felt like a huge win.
“You had me worried there for a bit.” Aabria said, which caused Alexis to flinch. Alexis noticed the pile of reddish-auburn hair that had accumulated next to her laptop. Got way too lost in thought there.
“Sorry dear, it’s just you had a smirk on your face, it's the same one you get after you play our little detective game.” Aabria clarified.
“Oh, yeah. I guess I did just figure something out.” Alexis said.
“That’s really good to hear.” Aabria said. She flashed her a warm smile. It was inviting enough that it made Alexis wonder if maybe she really could help. Fuck it.
“Hey, Aabria, you are heading out soon right?” Alexis asked.
“4pm on the dot, same as always.” Aabria answered.
“Do you mind if I walk you to your car? There is something I have been meaning to tell you.” Alexis asked.
Aabria seemed taken a little bit aback by this, but agreed. Alexis wasn’t certain how much she was gonna tell her, and if she did, how much she would be putting her in danger. But Alexis knew that Aabria was one of the few people she could trust. And in her current situation, that was one of the few certainties she had.