Message-ID: <33808asstr$1007370604@assm.asstr-mirror.org> Return-Path: X-Original-Path: not-for-mail From: Rass Senip Reply-To: rass_senip@usa.net X-Original-Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001 11:26:06 PST X-ASSTR-Arrival-Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001 19:26:06 GMT Subject: {ASSM} Tim, the Teenage MC - Chapter 21 (g/j) NEW!! Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 04:10:04 -0500 Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail Approved: Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Archived-At: X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation X-Story-Submission: X-Moderator-ID: hecate, gill-bates Tim, the Teenage MC By Rass Senip Chapter XXI: Fall 89 - Summer 90 Part 6 - A Lover, A Dreamer, That's me (no sex) "We were starting to think you weren't going to show," Karen said above the regular din at the Rage. "I had some things I had to take care of before coming tonight," I explained while sitting down beside her. "Where's Jon?" "Probably collecting beer bottles," Carl snickered. "He's working on something for school, but he said he'll try and make it," Jenny explained. Despite the steady and strong flow of the crowd's emotions, I had my empathic senses focused on just the people at the table. I immediately sensed Jenny was holding back on the explanation, but that wasn't necessarily cause for suspicion. "Chris couldn't make it either?" I queried. "She's here... Somewhere," Virginia stated, looking over some heads a moment before repeating, "Somewhere." "Anybody thirsty?" Karen offered, pulling a few iced down Busch beers in glass bottles from underneath the table and setting them in the middle of the tabletop. "Shit, Karen. How many do you have down there?" I asked as I looked beside my feet and saw a cooler at her feet. "Enough," Virginia answered for Karen, grabbing one and having Carl open it for her. "Jon's sure going to wish he hadn't missed this," Carl said while he and Karen each took one as well. "You got these in his honor?" "Dishonor you mean," Jenny laughed. "Something like that," Karen grinned. "Do I see beer at this table?" Mike crowed as he walked up, startling most of us. "Take one and shut the hell up," Karen hissed, tossing him one, which he nearly dropped. "What's the matter? Busch not good enough for you?" Karen asked me when she noticed I hadn't taken one yet. "I'm not really much of a beer drinker," I explained honestly. "I'm more a Jack Daniels man." "Now here's a man with the same heart as mine," Mike clamored just before spotting an empty chair three tables down and hurrying over to grab it. "Well have a beer anyway," Karen insisted, slapping a bottle into the palm of my right hand. Not wishing to create any waves, I opened the bottle and took a swig, then after making a slight face, I smacked my lips and said, "Ahhh." After Mike squeezed in between myself and Carl, the talk turned towards some stuff on TV and then somehow got on the subject of what color of underpants we had on. "If I had known there'd be a contest, I would have worn my Elvis briefs," Carl joked. "Elvis?" Virginia exclaimed while Jenny started laughing with abandon. "Heh... Wait. Briefs?" I queried. "Hey, don't go making fun of the King!" Carl said seriously. "Oh brother," Karen said under her breath to which I gave her a look of agreement. Suddenly Chris walks up and announced, "I think I'm love!" "Oh brother!" Karen exclaimed much louder than the moment before while the others gave a mixture of groans and comments like "That's nice, Chris.." "This is real... This time," Chris sighed, holding her hands against her chest with a far look in her eyes. "You say that every time some guy smiles in your direction," Virginia remarked. "But I felt it. I felt it in here when I..." "CHRIS!" Karen shrieked, cutting her off and scrambling over me to get to her. "What's the mat... Oh.. OH!" Chris exclaimed as she noticed me sitting there. "Sorry, I didn't know... Uhm..." As Karen and Chris headed for the ladies room, the tension which had shot up all around the table started coming back down as I pretended not to notice anything strange going on. Then when I took an impassive deep drink of my beer, the level dropped almost back to normal. "I take it Chris is a hopeless romantic?" I asked no one particular. "That's an understatement," Virginia gasped out. "You know, I used to be like that," Jenny offered. "Yeah right," Mike chuckled. "I was..." Jenny insisted. "So what happened?" Carl dared to ask. "My boyfriend took me parking and tried to get to third base." "And succeeded," I added with certainty after feeling her out a moment. "Yeah, I can believe that," Mike laughed while Jenny's cheeks turned red. I decided if I was going to get the information I wanted, I was going to have to get them as comfortable as possible around me, especially after Chris's blooper. So I drained my beer and asked Virginia for another, and was happy to see everyone else following my lead. "My dad calls me a hopeless romantic," I stated for the record after letting out a decently long burp. Mike's burp made mine sound like a baby's, but when Carl tried to out do Mike's, he accidentally burped out the other end as well which cracked everyone up. "So are you a hopeless romantic?" Virginia asked after everyone scooted away from Carl a bit. "From his point of view, definitely," I said before blowing across the lip of my bottle at different angles until I got a tone. "My dad would kill me if he knew..." Mike commented. "Knew what?" I asked. The tension shot up a bit again, but Mike handled it coolly by saying, "That I wasn't a virgin. He's a bit of preacher, you know?" "My dad is no holy man, but he's not all bad either," I said. "My dad couldn't care less if I was a virgin or not," Carl said. "That's because your parents are weird," Virginia said with authority. "They can afford to be weird," Jenny said. "I wish my parents had money like yours." "So what's stopping you from making it happen?" Carl asked after a long burp. "Oh, like I could just go rob a bank and get away with it," Jenny huffed. "When MY dad caught me making out with a boy when I was fifteen," Virginia interrupted. "I was grounded for a month. No phone, no TV, nothing but homework and books." "Heh. My dad took videos of my first sex." "Uh uh.." "Bull shit." I looked Virginia in the eyes and said "And he and my mom ate popcorn while they watched it with her parents." Everyone but Virginia stated their disbelief, for she had felt the truth of my statement in the brief empathic link. "Nobody but sickos would take videos of their kids having sex," Mike insisted. "You're making it up." "Just ask Suzi. She'll tell ya." "All right. I'll ask her tomorrow at the meeting..." "You could also ask Joey. His parents watched it too." "Man, all your parents are sickos..." Mike stated before draining his beer, burping, then noticing everyone else was looking uncomfortable. "What's up with all you?" "He knows, stupid," Jenny hissed. "Knows what?" "That you're all part of the Group," I stated. "About fucking time," Mike laughed, throwing his arm over my shoulders roughly. "Now lets go get some real booze." "I think I've had enough," I said, carefully removing his arm from my shoulder and standing up. "In fact, I've had enough of this whole charade. Thanks for the beer and the small talk. Nice knowing you." I took four steps away before realizing I needed to sober up a bit before I could navigate the crowd as it was. But then it occurred to me I didn't have to restrain myself from using my abilities in front of them any more, and simply blanketed the room to make a three foot wide walk space from my position all the way to the door. But just as I reached the main floor, Jon came through the door looking very bewildered by my walk path until he spotted me, then stood there with this stunned expression as I walked up to him, pulled the foot long three inch diameter tube from my coat and handed it to him saying, "Batteries are not included." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I awoke the next morning to a mild headache... and Joey sitting on the edge of my bed. "Morning," he said. "Morning," I echoed him, glancing at the clock to see it was 10:23. "Things didn't go very well last night," he stated. "Not exactly how I had hoped, no," I admitted. "Why? What's up?" "All the newbies were acting kind of weird this morning at the Group meeting." "What do you mean, weird?" He shrugged and said, "They just weren't themselves. Kind of down, I guess. They just didn't have the enthusiasm newbies usually have." "Newbies?" "Yeah. Most of them only just passed the coin test in January. And only about half of them have developed their voice." "Really? Why didn't you mention this to me before?" I complained. "I thought you already knew," he said frowning. "Why? Does it make a difference?" "Kind of," I said, sitting up and frowning myself. "I think." "So what happened?" Joey asked patiently. After I told him, he asked, "So you're pissed at them because..." "Because they set me up, Joey. They found out about my rendezvous with the two girls I was meeting at the Rave that first night I went there alone. I spent most of the day yesterday tracking down the real cause of the emergency that had kept the girls from showing up. It wasn't just a coincidence that Karen bumped into me that night and asked me to join them at their table. They planned the whole thing." "Which one's Karen?" Joey queried. My eyebrow shot up while I flashed him an mental image of her, then realized he probably didn't know all the voices by name, the newbies even more so. "Not that it matters, but Karen's still a mute." "You said you tested them with the coin?" "Yeah. That's how we've grown so large over the past couple of years. Every semester we test all the new students during the first week or so. Sarah used to borrow my coin to do it, but now I'm the official recruiter," he said with a short grin. "So that's why they all know you and Suz," I concluded. "I guess," he said, holding something back. "And?" Joey sighed, then said, "And that's probably why they went through all this trouble to get to you. The first two weeks of this semester I had all my classes plus recruiting to do, so I didn't have any time to help you settle in and do the stuff with you like I wanted to. They must have picked up on how worried I was about you feeling welcome here after the group attacked you and all... I think they were just trying to help bridge the gap between you and the Group." After about a minute or so of silence, Joey asked, "So what are you going to do?" I fell back onto my back and groaned, "I don't know. I can't help but feel they wronged me by tricking me like that... But..." "You're thinking about giving them a second chance," Joey concluded. "I guess. That's if they'll even see me to give me a second chance." "I don't think that'll be too much of a problem. Three of them are upstairs with Suz." "Now who's setting me up!" I groaned before throwing a pillow in his face. "Hey!" he said, returning fire with the same pillow. "I'm just the love slave following orders. Suz is the mastermind behind this setup. But if it makes you feel any better, I don't think they know you live here." Carl, Jenny, and Mike were sitting on Suzi's couch watching Suzi's copy of the tape my dad had made of our sex that faithful night so long ago. I stood there watching them exchange bursts of telepathic messages to each other, realizing that these three were probably the only ones who had gained full conscious control over their newly discovered abilities. One by one all three leaned forward in interest as the Suz-ball portion got underway. When Jenny glanced at Suzi and asked, "Didn't that hurt?", she noticed me and then hesitated before saying, "Hi." "You're missing the best part," I said, grinning when the two guys looked up in surprise, then motioned for them to go back to watching the video. Their exchange of telepathic messages increased sharply for a minute, but then as the video approached the climax of the scene, they practically stopped until it was over, at which point Suzi hit the stop button and flipped off the TV. "I guess you weren't making it up," Mike said apologetically. "I didn't make any of it up," I said while sitting down on the arm of the couch. "We didn't make anything up either," Jenny assured me. "I know you didn't. I would have sensed an outright lie." "We were just trying to be your friend," Jenny added. "Look, I think I understand why you guys did what you did, but I didn't last night because I didn't know the details. I'm sorry I led YOU on when I could have just told you from the start. But now I need to know what you want from me. Besides a drinking buddy to share kinky stories with." They looked at each other a few moments, then after several telepathic exchanges, Carl spoke for the first time since I had entered saying, "Before we actually met you, we thought you'd be a big show off and we could sort of learn some tricks off you." "But you didn't do anything," Jenny continued. "Or at least nothing I could detect the first night. And when everybody liked you, I talked Mike into standing watch the second night so I could see what you were really like." "Who stood watch last night?" I asked with suspicion. "Mike was supposed to," Carl said accusingly. "When Karen brought out the beer, I said, 'fuck this shit,'" Mike explained. "No way was I going to miss out on free beer a second time." "Like you don't get drunk every night," Jenny remarked. "Yeah, but that's different. It's not as fun if you can't get caught." "So you found I wasn't as big of a show off as some would lead you to believe," I said to put the conversation back on track while giving Joey a look. Joey shrugged as Carl said, "Yeah, but then you did that... thing with the crowd last night. That was awesome." "Yeah, that was too cool," Mike said brightly. "Nobody noticed." "Will you stop saying that?" Jenny groaned, then explained to us, "That's all he said last night after you left. Nobody noticed. Nobody noticed..." "It was just a blanket command with a subconscious amendment," I said modestly before looking over at Joey and asking him, "Don't you guys teach them anything?" "Telepathy 101 only covers getting control over their abilities. We don't cover blanket commands until TE310." "You don't seriously have class numbers for telepathy," I said with a cautious look on my face. "They're not in the course listing, but yeah, we do," Joey said grinning. "You're shitting me," I said with disbelief. "No he isn't," Carl assured me. "And TE101 is the stupidest class. We don't do anything... interesting.." "That's because you gained control over your voice the moment you realized them," Joey objected sternly "But for someone like Christina who's still trying to get a grasp on them after nearly a year of trying, it can make all the difference." "But why hold everyone back for the few who need it?" Jenny argued. Suzi waved Joey silent before he could respond, then asked, "What did you do in TE101 Friday?" "Practiced controlling our arms and legs," Jenny snorted. "The same thing we always do." "Yeah. It's so lame," Mike asserted. "I mean, what's the point of us doing it over and over when we already.... HEY!!! What the fuck!" His hands were feeling up his chest, obviously without his intending them to do so. I was snickering softly to myself before Suzi slapped him in the face a couple of times with his own hands and explained, "This was the hardest lesson I learned last semester, and I didn't learn it in a class, but during an attack. You can't protect yourself or anyone else if you can't control your own body over a stronger or more experienced voice. "So until you can control your limbs telepathically as easily as you can normally, you're not going to be shown anything else. If we did, it would be like sending you out to do battle with a sword and a shield, but without clothes or armor." "Nicely put," I thought to Suz before saying out loud, "On guard!" "What?" she peeped, then as she started turning in place on her tiptoes with her arms up like a ballerina, he cried, "Timmy! This isn't fair! You're as familiar with my limbs as I am!" "Which is my point," I said, making her do a little curtsy before terminating my control streams. "Armor doesn't do you much good if you don't have the shield and sword to compliment it." "So much for not showing off," Jenny snickered. "But I do agree with you Suz," I assured her as her eyes tried to throw lightening bolts at me to strike me dead. "Learning control over your own body is probably the best first step." "Which is why he could do that to Suzi so easily" Joey explained to defend Suzi's honor. "Tim got a lot of practice in controlling our limbs as much as his own when he was starting out." "And you know, if I had known the cause like I do now, I would have stopped when my head started hurting during those three ways." "You really don't know for sure what caused it," Joey reminded me. "Whoosh...." Jenny said, whooshing her hand over her head in emphasis. "Sorry... Old discussion," I said. "What was the point of this conversation again?" "I don't know, but I sure could use a beer," Mike announced. "Poor baby," Jenny cooed mockingly. "You wanted to know what we wanted with you," Carl said. "But in honesty, I guess it's up to you to decide what you're willing to do with us." "If nothing else we can just meet for drinks on Saturday nights like we've been doing," Jenny offered. "But you GOT to teach me that path thing," Mike insisted. "The drinks we definitely can do. The blanket command... we'll see. Uhm... So are you three the only ones who can use your voice?" We spent a good hour talking before I ran down to my apartment for a quick shower, then dashed off to meet Shelly for our first official study session at the library. To my disappointment, she didn't show. Shelly came in late to class on Monday, and after one look at her I knew immediately something was wrong, but I resisted probing her to learn what it was so I could try and consol her after class with a more natural perspective. Granted, my empathic senses didn't really allow for that too much, but over time I had learned it was better to go through the process of asking questions and reacting to their answers naturally than popping into their heads and getting it all at once without their knowledge. "I take it you forgot our study session yesterday?" I asked her after class as she got her things together to leave. "I guess I did. Sorry," she said, her spirit almost not existent. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like hell," I said sympathetically. "You would too if you had slept in a car the last two nights," she blurted out. "In a car? It was below freezing last night! Why the.." "Please, just forget it. I don't want to talk about it," she sputtered out as she walked away in a hurry. I grabbed my bag and hurried out after her, catching up to her just as she left the building. "You don't have class now do you?" I asked. "No." "So do you want to go to the library?" I offered. "No! I want to be alone, okay?" "Okay, okay..." I said, putting four or five feet between us, but continued to walk parallel to her. "Look, will you please just go away?" I shrugged and said, "I'm just going in the same direction as you are." "Oh," she said. "Then where are you going?" "Where are you going?" I countered. "I asked you first." "Well, then it depends." "Depends on what?" "Depends on where you're going." "Look, I don't KNOW where I'm going! Just go away!" "Okay. As long as you know where you're going," I said, turning and walking away, leaving her understandably baffled. Fifteen minutes later, Shelly walked into the dorm's cafeteria and got in line for food. When she came out I directed her attention towards me, then all I had to do was push the other chair at my table out with my foot for her to give up and come over. "How did you know I was coming here?" "I told you I was going the same direction as you were," I said, avoiding answering the question directly. "What do you want?" she sighed. "To listen." "Listen?" "To why you're sleeping in a car instead of your dorm room." "Maybe I like it. What business is it of yours where I sleep?!" she demanded. Switching gears, I simply commanded, "Sit." After her ass came to rest on the seat, I looked into her surprised face and said, "Either tell me you're going to go sleep in your dorm bed tonight, and mean it, or tell me why you can't. It's your choice." "I... I'll sleep in my dorm bed tonight," she stuttered out, her cheeks drained of color. "Good. Now relax and eat. I only have an hour to study with you." As I had said before, that logic class was my favorite that semester. Not only because it came easy to me, but it gave me new insight into how the mind perceived decision paths and how it made assumptions on imprecise statements. Okay, so in English that means I saw a new way to telepathically manipulate a person into seeing only two or more possible choices of my design without affecting their ability to choose between them. The "assumptions on imprecise statements" thing just gave me a better understanding of how politicians could basically do the same thing without the use of telepathy. Needlessly to say my way worked better. After going over her test with her, I managed to get her to commit to working after class the next week or two to get her caught up. I left her sitting at the table reworking part of her test without really knowing what her exact problem had been, but it was easy enough to guess it had had to do with her attraction towards her roommate. I got to Suzi's just as her phone rang, and through Suzi, Eric and I had a pretty good conversation. This might sound weird, but it was good to hear he was taking interest in guys again. And I was following his interests with similar interest of my own. In the past that kind of conversation would have made my eyes gloss over in boredom. I made a very loud "AAACK!" noise when I suddenly realized I grasped the sexiness of the male butt that she and Eric had described to me so many times without my really understanding it. I had always known what a bubble butt looked like, but suddenly I knew what made one more sexually inviting over another. It's a... Well you know... The more.. Uhm.. Shit. I guess you just have to like bubble butts to understand them. Tuesday on my lunch break I went in and saw Perry about scheduling time for myself. To my surprise he immediately grunted his consent, so I then carefully mentioned I wanted to also observe a few others as they worked without competing against them if I could. The man acted very passive. Not polite or pleasant, just... passive. I think he said a total of ten words, and that included the grunt hello and the grunt goodbye. Wait. Come to think of it, I think all he did was grunt. No.. He did say, "Damn right," to my suggestion I wouldn't compete against those I watched, so he hadn't been just humoring me without listening to what I was saying. At least I think. Anyway, in his shabby office he flipped a freestanding chalkboard to the other side revealing two sets of calendar month blocks painted onto the board. On the one filled in as the current month of March, he indicated I could choose either of the two days that week where only two people's names were signed. The rest of the days already had three. I signed my name to both which, when he noticed I had done so, he hit me in the nose a couple of times with the eraser and indicated I had to erase one. I swiped one off and ran out of the office to violently sneeze two or three times, then managed to tell him thanks for his time and I would see him Thursday. You already know what his reply was. Shelly seemed better Wednesday, and as we worked on the latest assignment together after class, she opened up a little about herself; things like she came from Ohio and loved coffee ice cream with chocolate syrup. Nothing of what I was really interested in came out, but then I didn't expect her to ever admit anything to me. Unfortunately, because she was royally sucking in the class, she was making the conscious effort to pay attention better, thus my supply of fresh lesbian daydreams seemed to have cut itself off. Skipping classes for telepathic excursions obviously was not new to me, and since I had been keeping a pretty good track record that semester, I didn't feel the least bit guilty about skipping classes all day that Thursday. I showed up at the admin building at nine o'clock sharp, just as the schedule had said, but ended up waiting over an hour before my two competitors finally wandered in. "Oh great," the dark haired slightly over weight guy said when he saw me. "Don't tell me you're here to play." Taken aback, I only peeped out a "I guess I am." "Look at it this way, Frankie," the shorter, skinnier pug nosed sandy brown haired guy said. "We'll be the first to see how good he really is." Sensing they were trying to intimidate me to favor their odds, I smiled brightly and asked, "Have you ever seen a pig fuck a cow?" When they opened their mouths to respond, all they heard come out of their mouths was oinks out of Don, the pug nosed guy, and moos out of Frankie. "Is that the best you can do?" Don said as he blocked my streams. "Anyone can do chicken shit tricks like that." "You're right. I'm sorry," I said, slightly grinning. "Do one of you want to go first?" "Seeing that you're still pretty new to all this, I'll go first," Frankie announced. "There's not much to choose from," I commented as the one woman and three men lined up before us. "These aren't the only choices," Frankie simply stated as more started filing in from the other section of the building. There were seventeen people in all, three of them were only like fifteen years old too. I knew the moment Frankie sent the three girls back to the other room without even considering them that I didn't like him, Don, or the stupid game that prioritized ease of cleaning over all else. Despite this, I have to give credit where credit is due. Frankie was good. In fact I would have to say his cleaning was the most efficient and thorough I had ever seen a non-empathic telepath accomplish. This isn't to say I wanted to copy his methods though. Far from it. He was horribly brutal to the subjects mind, causing all sorts of intense emotions, many times conflicting, all geared towards illuminating what mental patterns were natural and what weren't. Despite the seemingly cruelty, the end result was a fully command-free mind in only thirty-five minutes. I knew it would have taken me twice as long doing it my own way, but Dan had only cried a little during his cleaning and his condition had been several orders of magnitude worse. After both Don and I verified she was clean, the zombified woman that was lead away by a grad student and another woman who I assumed was a nurse of some kind. Don insisted I go next, but when he saw I was focusing my attention on the three girls, he warned me, "You'll probably want to ask to do a light probe on those three if you're serious about trying them." "Isn't that against the rules?" "Let him learn the hard way, Don," Frankie said while lazily stretching out on the couch. "And have Perry say we let him choose a ressy candidate without warning him? He'd scalp both of us." Frankie sighed like he was about to give away one of his best tricks and said, "I allow Tim to perform one light scan on each of the three ressy candidates. Happy?" "I allow Tim to perform one light scan on each of the three ressy candidates," Don repeated, then added, "Yes." "So what was that all about?" I asked. "Just say out loud I will now scan each of the three ressy candidates and do it," Don said patiently, then thought to me, "The walls have ears, and Perry loves formality." "I will now scan each of the three ressy candidates," I said out loud, then began a light scan on the first girl. After I scanned all three, I sat down on the chair I had placed in front of them with a deflated sigh. "They're pretty messed up," I admitted. "Too messed up to clean them and have anything left afterwards worth the trouble," Don confirmed. "I guess. Sorry girls." So I ended up picking one of the adult males who I remembered from last time and cleaned his mind in just under four hours. Don and Frankie spent another hour verifying he was clean, and it really upset me that Frankie put him through the same hell he had the first one after I had been so careful to keep the discomfort to a minimum. I came to accept Don as a pretty decent guy, so when they announced I had gotten everything and called down for the someone to pick up another one, Don's comment, "That was pretty good. You might have some new competition, Frankie," was high praise to me. Don wasn't bad himself, but nowhere near as efficient as Frankie, or myself for that matter. He finished the butch looking woman in under three hours, but I found a couple of things he missed, and to my astonishment, Frankie found another after I claimed she was clean. All in all, I felt pretty good that night about the whole experience. I had learned from Joey that Frankie was the all around champion of the game, and nobody but Don ever tried to go nose to nose with him since he never lost and loved to rub it in. I really started to despise the game itself though. Several times during the evening I had pondered on how to reduce my time in order to meet and exceed Frankie's speed. I was pretty positive that in order to do so I would have to resort to his methods, and that I absolutely would not do. After classes on Friday, Suzi and I went over to Joey's to go out with his family for Margaret's birthday. Joey didn't mention that Sarah would be there, so I was greeted by Sarah's dirty look when I opened the front door and walked in without knocking (as per Margaret's standing orders). "Hey," Joey greeted us next, purposely walking right into the entryway's wall with Tommy hanging off his back. "Tommy, watch where you're steering," he joked, producing another giggle from the eight-nearly-nine year old. Joey bounced from wall to wall as he led us to the family room where Tommy suddenly jumped down from Joey's back and rolled head over heels over to a baby laying on a blanket in the middle of the floor. "Peek-a-boo!" Tommy sang as he unrolled himself with his face just a foot above the infant's head. As the baby grinned and chortled it's pleasure to Tommy's surprise visit, Neil came into the room only wearing jeans, his hair and hairless chest still wet from a shower. "How did it go, Neil?" Suzi queried him. "Did you beat her?" "Only barely," Neil said, noticing my eyes on him, then avoided them when I looked up at his eyes. "Beat who?" I asked, temporarily forgetting the other pressing question concerning the infant on the floor. "McDonaldson," Joey answered for him. "She challenged Neil to a duel this morning." "Why?" I asked blankly. "Because she's a sl.. a... you know," Suzi said as Tommy gave the baby a raspberry on its tummy. "Ahh," I said. "And if she had won, you..." "Mom!" Tommy interrupted. "Kathy's stinky!" "Would have been sleeping at her place this weekend," Joey snickered. "Well then change her, Tommy!" Sarah's reply came. "I'm helping your Grandma." "Yeah, helping her talk," Tommy said under his breath, then looked up at us and said, "Anybody else want to do it?" "What's the matter, Tommy? I thought you liked changing her diapers," Joey needled him. "That's only when she doesn't shit in them," he complained, standing up and bending over to pick up the drooling child. "Then I'll help you, Tommy," Suzi offered. "Joey's been telling me how good you are at it." "That's because Kathy likes me to do it," he said smartly, leading Suzi towards the back hall carrying the baby almost over his shoulder he had her so high. "Because you entertain her so much," Joey remarked. As soon as Tommy was out of sight, I punched Joey in the arm and complained, "Why didn't you tell me?!?" "About what?" Joey said honestly. "About the baby," I said in a very hushed voice. "What?" Joey said, astonished, as Neil snickered and headed down the back hall as well. "Shit, Tim. How could not have heard about her? Didn't your mom or dad tell you about the dinner they had over here?" "No," I said, baffled. "They knew?" "Shit, Tim, they knew even before my mom and dad knew." "Wait a minute," I said, sensing there was more to this. "Let's start over here. First, who's the rug rat?" "Duh... Kathy. My niece." "That's what I thought," I confirmed. "So how did my mom and dad know before your mom and dad?" Joey sighed, then motioned we go to his room to talk privately. Neil was sitting on Joey's bed putting on his second sock when we walked in, his eyes staying firmly focused on his foot instead of looking up like his instincts would have liked. Joey explained the mess Sarah had gotten herself into in an attempt to save her failing marriage. I was truly shocked that Sarah had actually insisted on Wally altering her to feel the things she felt for Stan from back when she had been his slave. I always felt that Sarah was too uptight to ever allow someone else to mettle with her perception, especially like that. Kathy had been born the first week of December, a month earlier than Sarah had originally predicted when she had told her family of her pregnancy. While Kathy wasn't born premature, there had been a few complications during her birth and had spent the first week of her life in intensive care. An hour later at the restaurant, Joey mentioned out of the blue how I hadn't known about Sarah having Kathy until I saw Kathy that day and "had to ask who the rug rat was." Margaret immediately questioned me, "Didn't you get the pictures I sent you? I sent you almost a whole roll of just Kathy." "I... Yeah, I uhh.. I got'em..." I stuttered out. "Didn't you think it was odd she sent you so many pictures of a baby if it wasn't important?" Sarah drilled me. "But I didn't know!" I tried to explain. "My mom wasn't there, I didn't think about asking my dad, and I tried calling you, but nobody was home... And then I got into my painting, I guess I forgot about it after that. Nobody ever, ever," I said while giving Joey and Suzi blaming glances, "mentioned anything about... a baby." As Joey started trying to make it my parent's fault for never saying anything to me, the thought of where I would have put a baby in the paintings, followed by the concern they would want me to add it now made me realize ... "Say... Where are you keeping my Christmas present anyway? I haven't seen it since I wrapped it up!" When Joey exchanged anxious glances with his parents, I started getting anxious myself. "What's the matter? You didn't lose..." "It's down in the basement," Joey's dad said uncomfortably. "It sort of got messed up," Joey added. "Messed up? How?" I said rather alarmed. "It's my fault," Margaret explained. "I told them to put it in the garage until Christmas Eve because it was so big. We didn't know paint would crack from being in the cold." "The paint cracked?" I moaned. "On how many?" "How many?" she asked. "How many of the canvases did the paint crack on?" I clarified. They all looked at each other in confusion making me realize their mistake. "Joey!" I laughed. "You dork! I told you you would have to use a crowbar to pry off the stuff I shipped it in!" "What? What do you mean?" I rolled my eyes happily and said, "What you guys thought was my painting was just my first attempt that I used to make the shipping case. I tried cleaning the canvas off with turpentine, but it wasn't coming off easily, so I just used it, another messed up canvas, and some damaged frames to build this super duper shipping case to hold all five inside it." "Five?" Joey exclaimed as Margaret sighed with relief and Tom laughed. "I told you you would have to tear it apart. Didn't you think it was kind of... thick for painting?" "Well, yeah... But..." "And you thought I was getting old for thinking it was too heavy," Tom accused Joey lightheartedly. "Am I still in it?" Tommy interjected. "I don't know, Tommy," I said, grinning like a fox. "You're just going to have to wait until we get back to see." "You have to be in it, Tommy," Joey analyzed. "Because we talked about it on the phone Christmas night, and I made a big deal about you being the center of the scene." "Cool!" Tommy chirped, then sniffed a few times and moaned, "Mom..." "Tommy, you must have dirty diaper Radar," Neil remarked as Sarah confirmed Kathy had soiled her diaper again. "You would too if you were down here at my height," Tommy complained, holding his nose as his mother got up to take Kathy to the ladies room for another diaper changing. Tommy was no longer the quiet bashful boy I had first met three years previous. If anything, he was just the opposite. He wasn't obnoxious or anything, but he was constantly clowning around. Five or six times his mom or Margaret had to tell him to settle down during dinner, but that naturally only lasted a few minutes before wearing off. After all the times Joey's mom had washed his mouth out with soap as a kid before giving up on breaking him of his inherited use of cuss words, I was really surprised at how tolerant Margaret was of Tommy's frequent use of 'shit'. I never heard a single 'fuck' from him at the table, but Tommy didn't have any reservation of using 'shit' and I sensed he purposely used it as much as he could to make him feel more grown up. Sarah objected when Tommy wanted to ride back in Joey's car with Suzi, Neil, and I, but when Joey gave her a look, she sighed before warning Tommy, "If you give them any shit, you'll have diaper duty the rest of the week." "Shit!" Tommy cried, then after a moment of indecision he ran up to her and gave her a big kiss on the cheek before scurrying off after us. "You sure know how to play your cards," I remarked to Tommy after he climbed in the back with Neil and I and shut the door. "I bet your mom is still smiling." "My friend Josh says if you give them a reward whenever you get your way, they'll let you get away with more." "Your friend is pretty smart," Suzi chuckled. "Josh is going to be a spy when he grows up. He says you have to know how to man... man-upe.." "Manipulate?" I offered. "Yeah. You have to know how to Manip-e-ulate people just to get into spy school." "How old is Josh again?" Joey demanded while Neil and I laughed. "He's nine," Tommy stated with indifference, but secretly loving the attention he was getting. "Shit. I don't remember being that conniving at nine," Joey remarked. "How old were we when we conned your dad into taking us to see that rated R movie?" "Rated R?" Tommy queried. "Oh, we were a _lot_ older than nine," Joey said cautiously. "How old?" Tommy begged. "Older than you," I confirmed. "We were definitely in the double digits by then." "Oh..." Tommy said with disappointment, then suddenly exclaimed, "Double digits! I'm only..." Tommy silently counted the months left before his next birthday, then asked, "In one year and three months, can I go see a rated R movie with you Uncle Joey? I'll be in my double digits..." "No... Your mom would kill me if I did that," Joey said firmly. "But what if she said it was okay?" "Look, Tommy," I said, feeling guilty for having started the whole idea, "Do you know why movies are rated R?" "Yeah, because they put stupid naked ladies in them and, and, say things like shit and God damn. But I don't want to see naked people, and I won't hear anything I don't hear at school, so..." "The movie Joey and I saw... What was the name of it Joey? I can't remember." "Uhm... I don't know..." "I can't think of it either... Anyway, we wanted to see it because it was about this military academy for boys that for some reason people wanted to shut down. Only the boys didn't want them to shut it down, so they barricaded themselves in and shot at anyone who went near the place." "Cool," Tommy said, his eyes full of interest. "The National Guard surrounded the place, and the kids moms and dads tried to talk the boys into giving up and coming out and stuff. Then someone accidentally dropped a loaded gun that went off, or something like that, and everybody started shooting back at each other in defense." "Awesome! So the kids killed everybody?" "Shit, Tommy!" Joey exclaimed. "No! One of the boys that was our age got shot and died. It was awful. I got so sick to my stomach we had to leave before the end of the movie, and then I threw up in the car." "And I had nightmares about it for weeks," I added. "So then don't take me to see any stupid movies like that," Tommy argued. "You missed the point, Tommy," Suzi said. "They rate the movies R to warn kids that the movie has stuff in it they really won't want to see." "Bull shit!" Tommy spat. The car suddenly veered onto the shoulder as Joey slammed on the brakes, then just as we were all coming to our senses to ask what was wrong, Joey turned around and angrily said to Tommy, "Don't you EVER fucking talk that way to Suzi again, you filthy mouthed piece of shit. I'm not taking you to see a rated G, PG, PG-13, or R movie ever if you don't say you're sorry right now and mean it!" "I'm sorry," he whimpered with wide innocent eyes. "I'm sorry Suzi." "Okay, Joey," Suzi said gently while he continued to brow beat the withering boy. "Let's get moving or the others are going to wonder where we are." "Yes ma'am," Joey said automatically as he gave Tommy one last warning glance and turned around to drive. It was quiet for the remaining four or five minutes of the trip back, Joey's guilt from overreacting and Tommy's broken spirits making me feel even more uncomfortable than the others felt. I had been the one to mention the movie, after all. I knew Joey was just fooling to still be mad when he ordered Tommy to remain in the car after pulling into the driveway, but Tommy didn't and was scheming how he could soften up his uncle to reduce the impending punishment. If Joey had known that, he probably wouldn't have gotten down and offered the boy a piggy back ride inside, but like everyone else he assumed the kid didn't think like that even after Tommy having admitted he played his mom for a dope. Margaret and Tom were both already in the basement by the time we got inside and removed our coats. Tommy raced ahead of Neil and Suzi as they headed to join them while Joey and I stepped out into the garage and picked out the tools to pry open my Trojan painting. "Shit, I see what you meant," I exclaimed when I saw the cracked and flaking paint on the exterior. "It wasn't like that when I wrapped it up in brown paper." "I hope the ones inside are okay," Margaret said for the third time. "This was probably caused by the turpentine drying out," I said after taking a closer look. "I kept brushing it on until I saw the paint was just getting mushy and gave up." "Well, you packed the thing," Joey said, handing me the wedge and hammer. "I'll help, but I'm not going to do it alone," I insisted. "I'll help!" Tommy said, popping up between us and holding out his hand for a tool. "Tommy, why don't you go run up and get your mom," Margaret said firmly. "Awe.. Please ma-ma?" "Go on.." Tommy's huff was shortly followed by his slow stomping feet on the wooden stairs which only made Margaret hiss at him, "Tommy! The baby is asleep!" Tommy tiptoed the rest of the way up. Neil, Joey, Tom, and I were all working to pry off the center frame holding the two halves together when Tommy tiptoed all the way back down the stairs and up to his grandma to whisper, "Mom said she'll see it when it gets hung." "That girl!" Margaret huffed before marching herself upstairs, giving Tommy a turn to hiss, "Grandma, the baby is sleeping!" from her not so quiet footsteps. Once we had the four sides of the center frame off, we all waited for Margaret to come back down before going any further. Tommy peeked under the top half a few times, but naturally didn't see anything since I had individually wrapped each painting as well. The moment Margaret stepped on the top step of the basement, Tommy rushed up and lifted the top section off and tossed it aside, then got yelled at by Joey for doing so. "Is Tommy making trouble?" Sarah asked threateningly. "No," Tommy said before anyone else could. "Tim, I think you over did wrapping this present," Margaret remarked as she joined us all standing around it. "It's just that my favorite part of getting a present is unwrapping it," I offered as I knelt down, picked up the top most painting, and handed it to her. As she used her fingers to break the tape holding the brown paper in place, I handed one to Joey, one to Tom, got a surprisingly pleasant thank you from Sarah when I handed her the fourth, then called Tommy over to the larger center piece and said, "If you're really careful, you can open this one, okay?" "Cool!" he said, falling to his knees and slipping his fingers between the taped edges of the brown paper. At that point I just sat back and watched as they all removed all three separate layers of brown paper wrapping, Tom beating everyone else by revealing the canvas with Margaret and himself sitting in front of the fire place. Margaret was very touched by that one and the scene of the wild animals looking in the window which she opened, and Sarah was speechless for a few moments after getting hers open and seeing I had included Gina and Denise in the family portrait. And she even humorously complimented me on how good of a job I had done on Gina's pose. Suzi was fussing at me over Joey's, mainly grilling me over who's lipstick was on the cheek of his image standing there blushing with arms crossed, when Tommy flipped the center pane up out of the last layer of paper and made a big "WoW!!" I got out of the way as the Conners gathered around, getting a hug from behind by Suzi as they started arranging the pictures around the center piece until they got it right. "Can I hang mine in my room?" Tommy exclaimed. "No, silly.. They go together," Sarah said gently. "Then can we hang them all in my room?" "They're not ours, honey. They're Grandma's, Grandpa's, and Uncle Joey's." "But we're in the center one," Tommy insisted before looking at me and pointing out, "And I'm in the center of it. And Dad, Aunt Gina and Aunt Denise are in it too." "The label I put on the Christmas paper said to the Conners and Harrisons," I reminded them. "I'd prefer it if they were kept together, but I guess it's really up to you all to decide what to do with them." "Then they'll stay here, together," Sarah said firmly. "But, mom..." Tommy whined before whispering to her, "Then Dad and Aunt Denise won't ever see them." Despite having attempted to conceal what he had said from everyone else, Margaret had either heard it or guessed what he had said, for I felt her lose her high spirits and became occupied by her understandably bitter feelings towards her son-in-law. After dropping off Neil at his apartment building where he expected to have an extra bed attendant waiting for him, Suzi let out a contented sigh and said, "I'm so glad you moved out here." "Me too," I said honestly. As I parked my car in front of our building, Suzi became disturbed over something, and knowing her like I do I guessed it had to do with the lipstick I painted on Joey's cheek. "Timmy," she said snapping me out of my staring at her for several long moments. "When you were painting Joey's..." "I'll tell you a little secret," I said with a smile. "Originally that wasn't lipstick on Joey's cheek." "It wasn't? Then what was it?" I gave her a kiss on the cheek approximately in the same location as in the painting, then said softly "Your lips, silly. You're actually standing there kissing him on the cheek, only I painted over it to hide you since you're not officially part of the family... Yet." She smiled and gave me a peck on the nose before those damn commands in her head kicked in and made her open the door and get out. I followed her up and like practically every evening since I had moved there we spent the rest of the evening watching TV and talking before I went back to my apartment for my nightly routine. That night I dreamed I was a cloud floating around campus peeking in the windows of the buildings to see what was up. Sometimes I would float inside to watch and listen to the people's activities, entering into a couple of dreams after accidentally being sucked into one. By chance I drifted into the room of this one guy I had noticed in my morning classes that had a really cute face and butt. His name was Darwin Evert, and after drifting through Craig, his roommate, and finding his mind deeply asleep, I asserted my will within Craig's body and sat it up. I had control, yet sensations seemed very distant, and I had difficulty keeping my inhabited body on its feet as I crossed the room to view my object of interest. In the dim grey light, Darwin looked incredibly cute and sexy, his slightly parted lips inviting my own in an intoxicating way. My borrowed body's sensations began perking up as I uncovered the young man's shirtless chest and kneeled sloppily to sample his musk, somehow managing to avoid touching him from nearly falling over forward when my balance gave. I found myself straddling his limp arm between my legs, my groin becoming rather swollen by the nearness of his hand's touch. I gently reached down to his still covered package beneath the sheets, then carefully felt it out, measuring the size of his testicles and the limp noodle attached. Stirring in his sleep, the hand between my legs raised itself up and slapped me in my ass. Slightly shaken, I stepped back and watched as his arm folded itself successfully, then waited several minutes before approaching his silvery face and those inviting lips. His breath still held the minty odor of his toothpaste, and after inhaling several of his breaths and savoring its flavor, I resisted my urges no more and inserted my tongue into his mouth for a brief but very tasty sample of his mouth's inner juices. I was up bright and early the next morning to begin my observations of how different cleaning methods affect the recovery of a person's mental normality. I got to the old admin building around eight intending to scan the people waiting to be cleaned thoroughly, knowing ahead of time I would be invalidating any possible chances to clean them in competition for having advance knowledge of their conditions before hand. I was just walking down the hall heading for the stairs when one of the doors opened just behind me and I heard this "SHHING!" sound. I turned just in time to see Perry's cane bounce off the wall a mere foot behind me, then just as I started to react to his swift advance, I found myself falling from my left foot being hooked by the cane's L handle. In seconds I was face flat on the floor with my hands hog-tied behind me and Perry swiftly immobilizing my feet with my own shoelaces. "PERRY! It's only me, for GOD'S SAKE!" "Learn one thing, grunt!" he snapped at me after finishing with my shoelaces. "Friend or Foe, I will lunge first, immobilize second, and then kill if I suspect foul play. Now just be quiet and contemplate your mistake of surprising me while I clean up the damn mess you made me make with my coffee!" He left me laying there completely helpless for what seemed like forever, and after I got tired of waiting for him to let me loose, I just closed my eyes and began doing what I had gone there to do in the first place. Seven complete scans later, I was interrupted by Perry's foot slowly stepping on my face. "What are you doing, grunt?" he asked suspiciously. "Scanning," I said as best I could, hampered by the foot warping my face's curvature. "Scanning what?" he said sharply. "Scanning slaves," I said, finding the pressure becoming more than uncomfortable. "Why?" His foot had made it impossible to respond, but since I wasn't completely inert, I simply jerked my body to pull my face away from his shoe and then cried, "ARGH" as he managed to pin my lip to the floor. "Why?" he coolly repeated. "To study the after affects of cleaning them!" I cried. When he didn't seem satisfied with that, I added, "I want to lean how to clean people that helps them recover faster!" "Such a noble cause for a pathetic excuse for a grunt. Why don't you just leave these poor people alone and find some whore to play with. I don't need some punk kid trying to alter my program here." I freed my lip and spat, "Are you afraid that some punk kid might figure out a better way to help these people?" Three very hard taps of his cane on the back of my skull later, Perry calmly said, "That's what you get for trying to coerce me with my pride. The only one who should be afraid here is you, grunt." Gambling that as long as I was physically immobilized, Perry wouldn't actually do anything to me but bully me, I decided my best option was to explain myself to him and hope he truly was more interested in helping those people under his protection than intimidating me into submission. So I began rattling off everything I could think of that might have bearing. "This is a college, damnit. I am here to learn. My strongest ambition in life right now is to learn how I can reverse the damage other voices have done to people with the minimum side effects and producing the quickest and most painless recovery possible. "My voice is stronger than anyone's I know, but I rarely use it except in self-defense. "I am empathic, and through eye contact I can feel out the distortions in a person's mind without the use of telepathy. "I am not apart of the group, and I have no intention of ever being. "I have sworn an oath of celibacy until I marry the girl I proposed to last year. I have not broken that vow since making it." That hadn't been exactly true, but he didn't need to know the details, and probably didn't care. "I don't intend to do anything but observe until I have solid evidence to support my findings. Then and only then will I try anything different than what I have done in the past in my cleanings. "Not only do I have voice, but I can see the thought streams of a person's mind without actively probing for them. A person I once knew had this same telepathic vision and understood it in ways I am only starting to understand. She could clean a person's mind simply by smoothing out irregular streams. I think this could...." "This person was a woman?" Perry demanded suddenly. "A young woman. She is... sixteen now," I said, a lump forming in my throat at the very thought of having missed her sweet sixteen birthday. "How many others do you know that have the sight?" he asked without emotion. "Only myself, Je... the girl, and an adult woman named Lee Vo who was part of the Group for a couple of months before taking herself and her family into hiding." The only sound for several minutes was the movement of slaves on the floor above us, the gentle ticking of a clock somewhere, and Perry's rather unique sounding breaths. Then suddenly I heard the "SHLING" sound again, and I involuntarily shivered as one of the three blades of his cane scraped down my nose, then stopped at my upper lip as he said, "My word is not to be questioned. If I say jump, you jump, with no questions asked, before or after. If I say cut your thumb off and suck on it, you do it, or I'll do it for you. If I ever catch you in a lie, attempting to use any of your hocus pocus on me, or purposely exposing me to danger, no matter how little, I will personally choke you with your own intestines. Do we have an understanding?" "And what do I get in exchange for blindly following your orders? Your trust?" I asked, my parents' business sense demanding me to clarify both sides of the contract. "I trust no one. You will only gain my.... Cooperation." "That's it?" "I will also let you live," he growled impatiently as he purposely nicked me on the chin with his damn cane's blades. "Ow! Damnit. Look, if you agree to do the same for me, I'll..." "I don't follow anyone's orders, especially a hog-tied grunt's!" "Okay! Then just the part about no lying, tricking me, or putting me into danger. My word won't mean didily-squat to you if you can't trust me, and that won't happen if I can't trust you." He grunted, then in a blink of an eye his cane raised up and slashed down. Instead of letting some air into my spine, I found my slightly numb hands free as their bindings fell away. "I take it we have an agreement?" I asked in surprise. "If we didn't you would be bleeding in more than just one place right now," he said without emotion as he walked down the hall and went into his office. I hurriedly untied and retied my shoestrings, then stood at the door of his office waiting for him to direct me somehow. "What do you want now?" he finally barked. "Uhm... I guess I thought you were going to help me or something." "Look, grunt... I don't have anything to teach you. You wanted to observe, go observe. When you think you've figured out something, you better the hell be sure you're right before trying it or there will be hell to pay. In any case I don't want to hear about your ideas, conclusions, or how you cleaned all the ressies in one day. The only thing I want to hear from you is yes sir, and no sir. Clear grunt?" "Yes sir," I said, making no attempt to hide my anger. "Good. NOW we have an understanding. Close the door as you leave." I was rather discouraged after my ordeal with Perry and almost left. But I stayed and watched some Saturday morning cartoons with the gang upstairs, and by the time the group members scheduled to play the game that day arrived, I was feeling more confident about my overall plan. Isabella Smith, Jan Riveo, and Steve Kroch were not immediately open to the idea of having someone observe them as they played. Understandably, they saw my explanation as just as an excuse to learn their tricks. So I pointed out I eventually would probably compete against them and see their 'tricks' anyway, and I let it slip that I had already seen Frankie's tricks and wasn't about to use his cruel methods despite their efficiency. For once, my legend worked in my favor. They didn't seem to doubt I had already competed against Frankie and had faired well. But what convinced them was their idea that by helping, they could finally see someone beat Frankie and put him in his place. This of course wasn't my intended goal, but as I would find out later, most of the other voices that allowed me to observe them shared this line of reasoning. To my disappointment, I quickly realized that they all seemed to use the same method of inducing emotions to shake out what was natural or not. Frankie's wasn't even all that unique from the others, just the same technique taken to an extreme. I suppose what set Frankie apart from the others was his ability to determine the best commands that would induce the strongest version of the emotion he wanted, filter through the results, and then induce a different type of emotion that would compliment the last. Most of the others seemed to go about it in a nearly hit or miss fashion and thus taking longer and had more chances of missing something. So the only thing I could hope to gain by observing them was to see if removing different aspects of one's programming in different orders affected their recovery, and at first this seemed pointless to me. But then I started watching how the symbolic streams were affected during a cleaning, and that's when I saw how important the order really could be. From the symbolic stream point of view, the insertion of a segment of symbols not generated by the person's natural processes creates an irregular turn or twist that never seems to completely smooth out even after several years. Some smoothing does occur over time, for a person's streams are constantly changing accordingly to their experiences. How their experiences affect these changes are based on the current configuration of the streams themselves, and because the normal natural symbolic stream have no twists, juts, or sharp bends, the mind doesn't seem to be able to straighten these out. Over time, the smooth segments before and after an irregular segment tend to adjust their curvature to match the edges to the irregular segment. Once this is done, little by little the irregular segment is curved until it reaches an angle that is too great for the stream to naturally bend to. Of course the way the stream changes its curvature is by the swapping out of simple symbol groups during the intersection of other process streams, but that's a whole separate topic that quite frankly is too complex to discuss in full, but I may elaborate on it a little later. From this point on, I'll be mixing terms between the command and symbolic stream point of views. Essentially whenever I refer to a command, that is equivalent to a irregular symbolic segment, although technically any common telepathic command usually involves inserting multiple irregular symbolic segments into usually multiple streams. While a command may appear to be static, the underlying mechanisms of the mind adapt as best they can, affecting both the natural and the induced traits of the host's personality. The original command inserted into a person's mind can actually be modified by the mind's naturally inner workings, but only to a limited extent. Only under extreme circumstances could the command be jarred loose or bypassed non-telepathically, and then there would be far more damage done to the rest of the mind than the little good it did to disable the command. Now, the removal of a command is complicated by this process of adaptation or smoothing. As you would expect, you can't just remove the offending command after it had been in there for some time and expect the person to go back to normal. Putting memory aside for the moment, removing a segment of symbols from a stream will, in almost every case, cause a new irregularity to be formed just by the mismatched curvatures of the two sections you're joining together. Or from another perspective, if you remove a person's deep desire to fuck carrots before falling asleep every night, the person will have many sleepless nights before finding something to fill that gap in their personality. If you now add the effects of the person's memory in, you will see how easily it would be for a person to reform the same trait as the removed command had induced. If the person remembers that they never had trouble falling asleep after fucking themselves with a carrot, they very likely will raid the fridge looking for carrots, and indeed have an easier time falling asleep because their mind's streams had adjusted themselves to be that way back when the command was still firmly in place. The difference here is the person's mind would recreate a similar pattern of symbols to fill in between the two edges forming the irregularity. But they never regain the full strength or functionality of the original command because their mind can't reform the irregularity of the command. So in the case of the carrot fucker, they most likely would experiment and expand their selection to other sexually pleasurable vegetables or just out grow the fetish all together. That evening I was explaining all this to the newbies at the Rave over drinks, and by the time I finished, they all had questions which made it clear it all had gone right over their heads. "I still don't get why memory is so hard to get around," Carl complained. "You can plant memories, right?" "Yeah," I said a bit unwillingly. "So why can't you just erase the memories of fucking carrots so they don't figure it out that way?" "Because you can't," I sighed. "You can plant a new memory by forcing the conscious mind to dream it up and then have them recall the memory of that dream a half dozen times, but that's just a basic brainwashing technique anybody can do under the right circumstances. As far as I know there is no way to erase memories except by damaging the part of the brain the memory is stored in. "You can block the recalling of memories, but that gets messy really fast, and the mind a lot of times eventually gets around that anyway. You know, memory flashes, dreams, things like that. You can alter memories by forcing them to recall the memory with only small modifications, but that usually take a lot of time, and you still have the same problem of they recalling the original in a dream or memory flash." "Then what about for the ressies just removing some commands and leaving the rest in a while to give them time to adjust to just a few missing?" Jon asked thoughtfully. "Because the ones you didn't take out become more dominant in their personality than they would if they all were left in. The point of giving the ressies the chance to find something to focus on before cleaning them is to have something as natural as possible present after the cleaning that can expand quickly and limit the effects of what their minds regenerate in place of the missing commands." "Why are you cleaning them again?" Karen asked. "I mean, can't you just program them to be as normal as possible and not have to go through with the rest?" "Or after cleaning them, force them to accept what happened to them and to be normal for a while to give it time for all that to stick," Jon suggested. I sighed again, wishing I hadn't brought the whole thing up in the first place, but considered the best way to explain it that wouldn't generate even more questions. "Without a free will, a person can't react properly to situations they haven't been prepared for. Only God can program someone well enough to act normal under every conceivable situation, and you could say that he already did that before shipping us out from the factory. So what we want to do is reset the person to their factory defaults and let them deal with what happened according to their natural programming. "Because that's different from person to person, everyone defines what's normal differently. By forcing one person to behave according to another's conception of normalcy, you're essentially corrupting what's left of that person's original personality, which is what we really want to restore. "Or if nothing else, there's common sense. The more you alter a person, the harder it is for that person to ever return to something that's normal for them. My goal is to figure out if there's a way the cleaning can be done that makes it easier for the person to deal with their situation and regain a state of normalcy." "Let's talk about something else," I said when no one said anything right away. "I'm tired of thinking about it." "Tell them what you did today, Jon," Jenny prompted. "It's nothing big," Jon said almost bashfully. "I was in line at lunch and thought Jenny was up ahead of me but couldn't really tell. I just kept staring at her trying to see if it was her, and then I suddenly felt her thoughts." "Whose, Jenny's?" Karen asked. "No, the girl in the lunch line." "What did it feel like?" Virginia asked. "Did you feel her boobs?" Mike asked wickedly. "No, I didn't feel her boobs! It just felt like.. Uhm.. Sort of like how it feels when Jenny thinks things to me. But I was getting everything, not just stuff directed to a particular person." "Remember when Mike started hearing other people's thoughts?" Jenny said with a grin. "I knew you were going to bring that up," Mike said accusingly. "What happened?" I said, biting the bait. "I'll tell it, if you don't mind," Mike said, cutting Jenny off. "I was drunk when it happened and..." "You drunk? Nawhh.." I kidded. "when I heard them at first I thought they were just people talking in the room," Mike continued. "But after a couple more beers, I had to pee and went into the bathroom..." "He came hopping out with his underpants around his ankles yelling, there's ghosts in the commode! There's fucking ghosts in the commode!" Carl said as Mike took a drink from his beer. "Hey! I said I was telling it!" Mike complained. "Now I get to tell them about the time you tried making yourself into a better lover." "Do, and I'll tell them an even worse one about you!" Carl threatened without any real malice. "Oh please..." Karen remarked. "If I hear another one of your stories about what you guys do in your dorm room, I think I'll puke!" "You guys still live in the dorms?" I asked surprised. "Were did you think we lived?" Virginia asked. "I don't know.. I guess in a frat house or a sorority house." "I wish," Jenny said with a smirk. As I queried into the details of their living arrangements, I learned that the day they passed the coin test, they were given new room assignments on the second floor of Basler Hall, the newest and most modern dorm building on campus. While they still shared rooms with a member of the same sex, the floor was co-ed, including the bathrooms which was otherwise unheard of on the campus at the time. Their rooms were significantly larger, nicer, and completely modern, and the beds were full size, which to my standards was still tiny, but I could see that they could easily hold two people as long as they didn't mind their feet sticking out the end after sex. Twenty two people lived in the 14 rooms on that private floor, all of them having passed the coin test but had not yet fully developed their abilities to the satisfaction of the others to be allowed to live as they like. I suspected it was more to limit the amount of self-corruption that always followed the discovery of one's voice. By keeping them within a peer environment rather than turning them loose to freely experiment, they would learn from each other's mistakes as well as their own, and give them more time to mature and strengthen their moral integrity before achieving their independence. Jenny had been the first of this group to realize her voice. As with most telepaths, she had been overwhelmed by the sea of thoughts, and what made it worse was the fact she had been asleep when it had happened and was totally disorientated when she awoke. But even though at the time she had only attended one class of TE101, the instructions of what to do had at least partially stuck, and with the help of a few of the other voices who had already broken out, she had her voice under control by daybreak. A couple of weeks later, Mike had his haunting experience that ended in a rather anticlimactic way. After Carl managed to calm him down and got him to realize what was happening, Mike told the voices to go away, then finished the six pack he was working before passing out on his bed for the night. My empathic sense read in between the lines that there had been some telepathic exploration between Jenny and Mike before Carl broke out and Jenny took a bigger fancy to him. Luckily Mike had gotten tired of Jenny by then anyways, so there weren't hardly any bad vibes between the two roomies, and they even joked about it with Jon, who Jenny was currently seeing between the sheets. Jon had started breaking out the month earlier, but they were intermittent at best, and he never seemed to have access to them when he really wanted to use them. Chris had just the opposite problem. They were always there, but she had no real control over them. Karen roomed with Virginia, Jenny with Chris, while Jon had a room all to his self. As the night wore on, our conversation drifted from the sexual and telepathic topics to more normal college based ones, but as it got close to closing time, Mike got the others to prod me into clearing a path to the door again, which only made them ask more questions about how it was done. Sunday I met Shelly and a few others from our class to study for our test the next day. Soon after sitting down, Shelly suddenly became uncomfortable, and when I looked up I recognized Vanessa, Shelly's roommate, sitting across the library flirting with a really cute guy I had never seen before. I didn't know who to look at, the hotie or the cutie, so I looked at both, then suddenly became aware the others were noticing my stare. "Wow, she's hot," I said to complete their assumption. "She's my roommate," Shelly admitted gloomily. "And I take it you've got the hots for..." I said, nodding in their direction. "No!" she said somewhat alarmed, then realized I hadn't necessarily meant her roommate. "Well maybe a little, but it doesn't matter." She focused on her studying, but I could feel her heart wasn't into it, and by the time we were done, I was more than just a little inclined to cheer her up. "How about we go grab some dinner," I suggested after the group broke up for the night. "Thanks Tim, but I don't feel like going out tonight." "Awe, come on Shelly. It'll take your mind off of you know who." She eyed me a moment, then as she opened her mouth to decline again, I said, "Or you can eat at the cafeteria, then go back to your room and wait for your roommate to come back from her not so studious study date." She sighed, then said, "And after dinner what do we do?" "We could go to the Rave and dance..." "Anything else?" she said unconvinced. "I don't know.. It's not like I'm asking you to come over to my place to check out my hot tub or anything." "Are you sure you're not?" she asked suspiciously. "Well, considering I don't have a hot tub, yeah, I'm sure." "I just don't want you thinking I want to be anything more than friends," she said. "Oh..." I said, truly a little hurt. "I see." "Not that you couldn't be more," she floundered. "I'm just not ready to start something up with someone again so soon." "Well, the dinner offer still stands," I offered. "Oh, okay. But just this once." We went out for pizza, something we both agreed that friends could go eat without it having to be a date. She told me a little about her last boyfriend who broke up with her after nearly five months of what she thought was a great relationship. She didn't go into details, but I could tell she was still hurt a little by the whole thing even if it had all taken place the previous year. I asked her about the guy that was with her roommate, finding she did know some details about him to my surprise. Tony Pendleton lived on the same street as I did, in the same style apartment building as mine. He played on the tennis team, which instantly caused me to form an image of him wearing tight shorts. Vanessa and Tony had started dating in November after getting acquainted from noticing each other at the Rave. Shelly admitted they made a nice couple personality wise. Then I asked about what her roommate was like, Shelly wasn't sure about doing that at first, but once she started talking about Vanessa she started feeling better. It was nine o'clock before we realized it, and she didn't seem too enthused about my suggestion of stopping by the Rave and eventually said she'd just rather call it a night. So I just took her back to the dorms like she asked without pushing anything else. But before she got out of my car, she looked me in the eyes and triggered an empathic connection that left me smiling the short trip home. I fell asleep thinking about her, which is probably why I had the dream I had that night. I dreamed that the empathic connection was still slightly open, that as I floated through the empty space between the distant stars, I could feel her calling me, inviting me into her being, into her soul... I followed this stringy sketchy trail of star dust back to its source, joining with her fiery blazing light and adding my own unique glow to hers. We became aware of another heavenly body floating near by, gravity tugging our attention to it as we rose out of the deep gravity well which was our sanctuary and focused our joined beings on the object of our immediate needs. Eyes focused on the sleeping form of this heavenly creature, we swept our covers off our legs and turned ourselves to face the body with which we intended intersect. Standing up brought swift and all too brief pleasure to our tingling erect nipples from the cloth's movement across them, yet we shed them in order to give off our full natural glow. We yielded to the constant pull of this new gravity in front of us, letting our nipples guide us forth towards the similar yet much more towering hidden mountains of the body we were compelled to embrace and share our cosmic rays. Running a sleek and glowing finger across the sleeping face below us, the landscape began to shift and turn before a windy gasp and a twin pair of glass like pools reflected our glow back with a sense of fear. But we were there to warm her with our glow, we reasoned, and so we began to do so, emitting every ounce of our body's intensiveness, giving everything we had to make her see we were not a danger to her, not something to be scared of, just another warm body who's loneliness could be abated with the simple sharing of another's brilliant light and energy. And so when our heavenly sister accepted our glow and began to emit her own glow in return, we began our decent into her own gravity well, our cooling limbs finding new warmth within her soft and glowing fields of femininity. The glow of my counterpart began to overcome my own, and as the two heavenly bodies exchanged their first kiss, my fire's strength wavered and so I began to fall away in order to rest, knowing I would return and be one again with the other fires I had joined that day. -------------------------- My heart almost stopped when I recognized the glow coming from Shelly the next afternoon. I had wanted to believe it had just been a wonderful erotic dream, but in the back of my mind I had acknowledged the possibility it had been more than just a dream. Shelly seemed on top of the world, and flew through the test with confidence. In fact she finished so quickly and left that I didn't have the chance to talk to her, but then I didn't really know what I could have said. Joey tried to make it sound like it had been inevitable for me to find some sexual outlet like that, but neither Suzi or I bought it. Figuring a phone call to Eric would help take my mind off of Shelly, Suzi called him that night, but we ended up talking about it and surprisingly Eric convinced me that all I had done was help Shelly make some kind of connection with her roommate. I then convinced myself that it really had been all Shelly's doing, that she had initiated the empathic connection, that she had called me to her, that she, not I, made the decision to cross the cold gap between the gravity wells.. Er.. I mean beds, and perhaps through my empathic abilities shared her feelings with her roommate who had accepted them and returned them willingly. That lasted until Wednesday's class where Shelly was as miserable and confused as ever. She didn't want to talk after class, but she did allow me to take her to the ice cream shop and ruin her diet on a large coffee sundae with rich chocolate syrup. And then suddenly, with only three bites left of her sundae, a bubble popped and she started talking about Vanessa and couldn't stop. At first it wasn't anything she hadn't told me before, but then she started explaining how Vanessa had been the first person to make her feel special since Kurt, her ex-boyfriend, broke up with her. From there it just went deeper and deeper into her feelings for her, and the whole time she talked she kept looking into my eyes for my support. I guess she found what she wanted since she didn't stop until she had told it all. When she finally fell silent, she wasn't emotional, and she hadn't shed a single tear. Oh, she was shaking a little, but she wasn't falling of an edge like I would have expected her to. Instead she said, "Well, now you know my secret." "I won't tell a soul." "I wasn't talking about Vanessa," she said with a weak grin. "Huh?" I said, honestly confused. "I always spill my life's troubles after eating coffee ice cream," she chuckled somberly. "What does the chocolate syrup do to you," I joked. "Makes me fat," she chuckled with more humor, then added, "Fat-er." "I don't think you're the least bit fat," I said honestly. She smiled briefly, then fell silent as her eyes went distant as she recalled Vanessa's words, "It didn't happen." "It did happen," I said, snapping her back to the present. "You know it, and she knows it. Give her time. Her head is probably spinning so hard right now she's just trying to keep it from flying off." "I know how she feels," Shelly admitted. "I've never done anything like that before. Ever. Not even with Kurt...." She went silent, and I could feel her emotions finally starting to snap, her eyes filling with water as she stared into empty air. "What have I done? I've ruined my life!" Shelly finally sobbed quietly, covering her face with her hands. "What, by kissing another woman and bringing her off with your fingers? Shit, I've gone a lot further than that with other guys, but now I'm engaged to a girl and I've sworn to be faithful to her and only her." "You're engaged?" she said with a mixture of emotions. "Yeah," I said, feeling a little shakiness rising from my gut. "The point is, you're probably just going through a phase in your life where you're afraid to be hurt by another guy, and found so much comfort in your relationship with Vanessa you... You know.." "I keep telling myself things like that, but I just keep... Thinking of her." "I can see that," I said, grinning. "You want to know something?" "What?" "I keep thinking of you and her..." "Well, at least I'm not the only one," she hissed looking me in the eyes like she had three nights before and triggering the empathic connection again. "I uhh..." I said, jerking myself out of the link. "I better get going." "Oh, okay," she said, standing up as I did and started putting her coat on. "Well, I guess I'll see you later," I offered as we walked out the shop, wondering how soon later would be. "Yeah, uhm... Thanks," she said with shaky affection. "For the ice cream and stuff." I looked her in the eyes and said, "In more ways than one, it was my pleasure." Even with Suzi's help, the evening just dragged on out of anticipation. I couldn't detect any kind of residual empathic connection, but I doubted I really needed it to find her mind in the middle of the night after having done it twice before. Naturally, I was torn between my sense of commitment to Jennifer and my loins doing what they did best, and no matter how much I considered commanding myself to refrain from using my telepathy in my sleep, I kept talking myself out of it saying it wouldn't prove anything to Jennifer if I cheated resisting temptation like that. So I ended up allowing fait to decide what would happen that night. Fait sure seemed to have been getting a lot of my time back then. As if the evening was bad enough, falling asleep proved to be even more frustrating than staring down a banana sundae served in a hairless cunt, complete with a whole banana and a tasty cherry to top it off. I went to bed around ten, tossed and turned, jerked off to at least three climaxes, even tried self-hypnosis, which I have never gotten to work, and finally, after jogging around the block three times, taking another shower to rinse the sweat off, and then squeezing out another orgasm from my little buddy, I fell asleep sometime after three thirty and slept soundly for the rest of the night. I was exhausted the next day, but managed to stay awake during my important classes and only drifted off once during a slide show in the other. I went straight back to my flat after my last class and just collapsed in my chair and flipped on the TV. I was out before the first commercial break, and sure enough I found myself floating within a very busy blue sea. As tired as I was, I just let the currents take me wherever they wished, slipping through one cluster of spinning seaweed, getting battered by another, then eventually drifted into a less active, almost peaceful cluster of seaweed that I found slightly familiar... And who seemed desperate for change in their dull life. As silently as I could I attached myself to the lazily spinning stalks of my new host, ever so gently tapping into its life giving bloodstream. As I gorged myself on my host's excess energy, I began to carefully probe my benefactor's senses and swiftly located the center of its being. Then with a swift strike I plunged the very core of my being into it's own, and quickly the two of us became as one. Our eyes snapped open as the confusion of our melding melted away. Our surroundings were the same as they had been, sitting in our class, struggling to stay awake as the instructor's dull voice became even duller to our sleepy ears. But wait... There he is. I know him... Don't I? Yeah, I know his name. Darwin. Man he looks hot. I wonder if he knows how hot he looks staring out into nothing with the tip of his pencil touching his lips like that. Man, if only Vanessa's lips looked like that. I'd never stop kissing her lips if they looked as sexy as ... What am thinking? I'm getting hard over him? And why not? He's cute as hell. Stop it... This is too queer for me. Oh, but look at him... God he makes me hard. I bet he smells good too. Oh shit, he sees me looking at him. Better pretend I was looking past him. Holy shit. He smiled! What the fuck? Is he coming on to me? Look at him. Now he's blushing. God that is so fucking cute. I think he's about to.. Shit, what do I do? I can't believe I just smiled back at him. I'm fucking flirting with this.. queer. I got to stop thinking like that. Queer... There's nothing wrong with being attracted to another guy. It's not like I want to have his baby. Now that would be queer.. Wow, I think he's actually interested in me. If he just would look back one more time so I can make eye contact... Damn. Why is it that the end of the class never comes soon enough except when I don't want it to! Man, and he's in a hurry too. Well, I guess I'll just have to wait until next week. Hmmm, he has a nice ass too. "Hey, you're Tony, right?" What the fuck? Why did he come out here if he wanted to speak to me? "Yeah. Darwin, right?" Man he's even cuter when he's surprised. "Yeah! Uhm, I'm sort of waiting for somebody to bring me a book, but if you're not busy, maybe we could grab something to eat at the Rave or something?" "Sure. I don't have anything I have to do right now." Liar. Only my Spanish history lecture. Oh man, I just want to grab his ass... "Sorry." "No problem." I touch his ass and he thinks he bumped into me. Is he really that na ve? "Neil! Over here!" OH shit! OH shit oh shit! He's not recognizing me... And he doesn't seem to act like he suspects. That's right, Neil... Look in my eyes just a little longer. What are you hiding in there? "Well, I got to go, Darwin. I'll see you Sunday." Why would Neil be seeing Darwin on Sunday? "Ready?" "And willing." Definitely not na ve. Man if he touches me like that again, I think I'll... "Want to go to my apartment first?" "Uh.. Sure." Thank God Larry has lab today. We'll have the apartment all to ourselves. "You know Tony, I would have never imagined you'd be... interested. Or at least not in me, anyway. You never gave me any signals before." "Well, I guess that's because I wasn't interested until today. I just sort of woke up out of a daydream and saw you sitting there..." What is going on? I'm taking this guy I barely know to my apartment in hopes of.. having sex with him? Stop. I'm not gay. I'm not gay. I'm... "Are you okay Tony?" "Huh? Yeah, I'm just... I've never... uh..." "It's okay. I understand. I guess I came on a little fast. I kind of had the feeling you were new to this. Let's just go to the Rave and skip the apartment thing. I didn't bring any protection today anyways." Holy shit, this is a regular thing with him. Oh man, I got to end this now. Quick. Before I end up wanting to suck his... "That's.. okay... I got a couple of rubbers incase my new girlfriend... Uh.." "Are you sure? I mean, if you're seeing someone.." "Let me put it this way, it's now or never. I doubt I ever feel this way again." Look at him. He's torn. Maybe this will make up his mind. Shit, and I thought I was hard... "Timmy?" Huh? "Timmy! Open the door!" I opened my eyes with a start, and as the remaining link to Tony faded away, I yelled, "Yeah, I'm coming, Suzi." "What were you doing?" she asked suspiciously when I opened the door. I yawned then said, "I was watching TV, and I guess I sort of dozed off." "And you were dreaming again?" I sighed, then with a wiry grin I said, "You could say that." "I knew it." "Why are you here? Aren't you supposed to be at a Group thing?" "I was until Neil detected your dreamtime self hanging around his cousin sending out fuck me waves." "Fuck me waves?" "That's what he called them. He said if he hadn't left when he did, all three of you would have probably been... Timmy, tagging along for the ride is one thing, but the guy you..." "Possessed?" "This isn't funny," she chuckled. "Tony is completely straight. Can you imagine what it would be like for him to suddenly be himself again while what's his name," "Darwin." "While Darwin was humping his butt?" "I imagine he'd be a little surprised," I said. "A little!" "Look, Suz. I admit this isn't something I want to happen every time I close my eyes, but... I wasn't really the one doing the driving. I don't know why it happened, but while I was with him, this part of Tony that he usually represses came to the surface and took control. I'm starting to think I'm actually being attracted to these people because they... need me." "Need you? That sounds a lot like an excuse to me." I stepped up into her space and gently took her face in my hands and stretched it to make the worry lines disappear. "Don't you trust me?" I asked softly. "Of course I trust you. But when you're dreaming..." "When I'm dreaming, it's still me. Well, in this case, me and somebody else. This is new to me Suz. I want to explore it a little more before deciding whether it's good or bad. Okay?" She grasped my hands with hers and gently pulled them off her face before entwining them with her own and saying, "Just please don't get anyone pregnant? Okay?" "I'll try, Suz... I'll try. Now, how did you know about Tony and his sexual preference, hmm?" The blush on her face said it all as she turned around and left. -- Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: | | FAQ: Moderator: | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Archive: Hosted by Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository | |, an entity supported entirely by donations. | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+