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From: Rass Senip <rass_senip@usa.net>
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Subject: {ASSM} Tim, the Teenage MC - Chapter 21 (i/j) NEW!!
Date: Mon,  3 Dec 2001 04:10:06 -0500
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Tim, the Teenage MC
By Rass Senip
Chapter XXI: Fall 89 - Summer 90
Part 7 - A Pickled Matter
(no sex)

On the last day of regular classes, I had a test.  A test.  I also had a final
for that class two days later.  Is that stupid or what?  I can't tell you how
tempted I was to correct that injustice.

Granted, Political Science wasn't my favorite class.  Whatever possessed me to
take it, I didn't know, but I was determined to get an honest A in it.  

I guess I shouldn't have blamed myself for letting my guard drop so much that I
fell victim to the most unique and unusual attack I had ever encountered to
that time, but it had been such rude awakening to how relaxed my defenses had
become that I would never again go without a mental barrier like I had done all
semester long.

I remember having difficulty with the essay portion of the test.  I kept
spelling words wrong, but I don't know how many I actually corrected before
falling under the pickle-pickle spell.

Yes, the pickle-pickle spell.

"Pickle, pickle, every pickle pickles, pickle to the pickle."

At least that's what I had written on my test before completely pickling out.
I can only imagine what I must have said out loud.

Now, I didn't stay under the spell for its whole duration.  No, nobody in the
group came and snapped me out of it.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I guess
you could say Joey did, but not in any way intentionally.

I had three tremendous shocks all within twenty seconds or so, the first was
feeling the sharp hot pain of a bullet burrowing into my back and through my
right lung.

After hitting the floor with my face, the sensations evaporated, and after I
regained my senses enough to take inventory of my condition, I was then shocked
again by the knowledge that besides a slightly bleeding lip, I was fully intact
without holes in my body that weren't supposed to be there.

The instant obvious conclusion raced through my head, and in the time it took
me to get back to my feet while gasping, "Joey," the third shock hit me as all
of my classmates turned towards me muttering, "pickle," in various emotional
voices.

Just hearing the very soothing and welcoming word caused me to lose my grasp on
the situation a moment.  Actually this was somewhat of a saving for me, for
during that moment I muttered the magic word myself, and the other pickled
students lost interest in me.

My old instincts finally kicked in enough to make me raise a telepathic shield
around my mind.  If I hadn't, I am certain I would have joined the others in
their pickled existence and that I would never have forgiven myself for.

I was just trying to take in what was happening when several of my nearest
classmates took notice of my lack of pickle muttering, astonishingly issuing
several very crude telepathic commands with the intent on repickling me.

Within a couple of heartbeats, the others in the room seemed to become aware of
my condition, and as I sensed their strangely charged symbols forming the same
commands as the others had, I put up a false pickled personality and responded
with an enthusiastic "pickle-pickle" in time to divert their massive attack.

I wasn't out of the woods yet, however.  They seemed disturbed by my shield and
were constantly issuing verbal pickle queries to which I did my best to respond
to.

After dissolving my false personality and mimicking their actions as best I
could, I became increasingly desperate from the never-ending pickle demands.
My break came when I accidentally made full eye contact with one of them and
was overwhelmed emotionally by their pickle-ness.  When I reflected that
emotion back at them, the guy literally passed out from an overload of
pickle-ness.

I was emotionally drained by the time I had knocked out the whole room, and it
quickly became obvious that I wasn't done over-pickling people.  I could feel
hundreds more all around me, and in fact that was all I could feel.  It was
like the whole world was just a bunch of pickles.  But even if it was, I had to
find Joey.  Pickled or not, he had to have been seriously injured for me to
have felt it like that.

As I continued to assess the situation, I glanced at the time and was startled
to find it was already a little after two in the afternoon.  My class had
started at noon, meaning I had been a pickle for more than an hour.

Scanning the surrounding area didn't paint a very rosy picture.  There were
pickles out in the hall, pickles in the surrounding classrooms, pickles
outside, pickles above, pickles below, and with the sound of a groggy
"pickle-pickle", I realized the pickles in the room were starting to wake up as
well.

My instincts told me using a blanket command to keep the twenty or so
classmates and its instructor under would be like putting a flashing target on
my head, and seeing that I couldn't sense very far with all these pickles
around me, my best option was to get the hell out of there.

I slowly opened the door and slithered out, immediately finding all twelve
pairs of eyes in the immediate area of the hallway were focused on me
intensely.

Mimicking their own actions and to some degree their thoughts, I calmly walked
down the hallway thinking and muttering "Pickle, pickle," finding that while
they didn't ignore me, they also didn't try to stop me, and that's all I really
cared about at that point.

Walking down the steps to the main floor turned out to be impossible.
Apparently while pickles seemed to be quite capable of walking around, even
running as I found out later, they didn't seem to grasp the concept of climbing
or descending stairs.  There were anywhere from ten to thirty pickles clustered
at the tops and bottoms of the stair cases with a few apparently stuck on the
stairs in between floors.  They would have instantly seen me as a non-pickle if
I had done something so unpicklely as going downstairs.

So I took the elevator.  It wasn't hard.  The single pickle in the elevator
didn't seem to question the elevator's movements, and even seemed rather
relieved to have another pickle wander in to swap pickle-pickle comments.

Sadly, I just wasn't pickle enough for her.  Heh.  After she became very
dissatisfied with my pickleness, I had to resort to zapping her with my pickle
stare, but got a nice feel of her bod as I helped her down to the ground.  

I didn't have any further problems getting out of the building, but not ten
feet away from the entrance I found an unconscious Eta who had been severely
beaten.

The pickles around me became visibly agitated by my attention to a subdued
non-pickle, and before I knew it, I was running from a small mob of pickles
that had violent intentions towards me.

All I got to say is, thank God for steps.  It took me a couple of panicked
dashes from one set of steps to another before I managed to fool the pickles at
the opposite side of the steps that they didn't start to chase me.  Of course
it was also rather difficult to find steps that they couldn't just walk up the
slope beside them or get around some other way.

By the time I was walking among them without any of them chasing me again, I
had seen at least four beaten people laying unconscious along the way and had
to focus myself on just the "pickle-pickle" stuff while sneaking in a few
thoughts in between about what I should do or where to go.

I wandered around a bit looking for a place to hole up, preferably with lots of
stairs and doors I could lock.  Unfortunately, everywhere I went had pickles
inside them, and I was about to try my luck at using a phone to call for help
when I faintly sensed someone scanning the area from the newer physic's
building.

Whatever it was that was doing this to people had the added effect of clouding
my telepathic senses.  I felt like I was walking in a fog towards a faint
flickering light that of course stopped just as I was starting to get a firm
fix on it.

With pickles everywhere I went, I didn't dare probe for the source myself, and
just made my way slowly into the building.  Since the source had been at least
a floor or two up, I immediately looked for an elevator and found two, both
with a large group of pickles around them.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a red horn of the fire alarm just above
a glass door with a fire hose behind it.  Straining to keep my thoughts from
racing while I was under the scrutiny of so many pickles, I came to the
conclusion I needed to draw the attention of whoever was upstairs to me, and
what better way than with horns and a few flashing lights.

You wouldn't think it would be that difficult to find one of those little red
boxes that manually triggered the fire alarm, especially in a modern physics
building where you expected people to blow things up once in a while.

I finally found one behind a big plant in the foyer, which in a way was a good
thing since the plant hid me from the ever present eyes of the pickles around
me, plus I was near the exit which had steps leading up to it and no ramp on
that side.

The coolness of the chemical in the glass vial that broke when I triggered the
alarm startled me, and between that, the noise of the alarm, and the probes
from upstairs shooting out, the pickles in the foyer became very hostile
towards me.

My route outside was blocked by a pickled Eta knocking over a plant in front of
the doors as he moved in to probably pulverize me, and after only receiving a
few scraping blows, I thrust myself out into the main hall and desperately
dodged the pickles racing towards me, tripping them with their own feet or
running them into the walls and each other, quickly running out of room as my
telepathic activity brought them out in droves.

I was getting knocked around quite a bit and had lost where the stairs were
when suddenly there was a ding of an elevator followed by...

"HEY YOU GUYS!  COME AND GET ME, YOU PICKLE HEADED SHIT FOR BRAINS!"

I almost got run over by the crowd of pickles running to silence the
non-pickled voice, and I was so stunned by this it took me a good ten seconds
to realize they had totally forgotten about me.

"RUN FOR THE STAIRS, IDIOT!" the muffled amplified voice said over the roar of
"Pickle! Pickle!" just as I had turned to do so.

When I got to the stairs, I found not only the bottom clear of pickles, but the
landings above also void of pickles despite knowing there had to be pickles up
there somewhere.  I climbed to the first landing as quickly as I could, then
paused a moment to get my breath back while straining my telepathic senses for
my fellow pickle refugees.

A distant repetitive clanging drew my attention just as it stopped, and I held
my breath listening anxiously, sensing it was a signal from my benefactors.
When the clanging returned, I concluded they were trying to tell me what floor
they were on, but the damn fire alarm echoed really bad in the stairwells, and
I just couldn't be sure if the clangs I heard were all clangs or echos of the
alarm.

So I just started climbing, figuring that if nothing else, I could tell what
floor they were on by the loudness of their clangs.  The building was eight
floors plus a basement, but they stopped clanging when I reached floor three
and didn't restart even when I got up to floor eight.

With pickles on each floor near the stairs, it hadn't been easy to slip by them
without their notice, even with all the stairwell doors closed from the fire
alarm going off.  I pondered on what to do next while sitting on the steps just
below the eighth floor, and I came to the conclusion that being trapped in this
building with who knows who wasn't going to help me find Joey and help him.

If it wasn't already too late.  An hour had already gone by since I awakened
from my pickled state.  If Joey had been shot, he could have already bled to
death by now, and that's only if whoever shot him hadn't finished him off
before hand.

I looked up for some divine inspiration or, even better, a miracle, and after
nothing immediate happened, I sighed and closed my eyes with the image of the
45 degree slope of the backside of another rise of stairs fading from my eyes.

I snapped my eyes open whispering to myself, "Stairs?  Stairs that go where?"

"The roof," I answered myself a moment later after climbing up the rest of the
steps to the eighth floor and peering up to where the steps rose to.

The landing above had a metal ladder that went up to a hatch... that was
padlocked.

"Damn.  I wish Joey was here," I muttered after climbing up and checking it out
close up.  Joey was better at picking locks than I, not that Joey would have
had any better luck with a padlock like that.

I was just about to climb down when I noticed the screws for the hinges were
exposed, and in ten minutes, six of those were on the floor below me as I
pushed open the hatch.  Or at least I pushed it open as far as the padlocked
clasp would allow me to.

The opening was big enough for me to squeeze through, and once I had, I felt
safe for the first time since I awoke from my pickled nap.

It's amazing what altitude can do for your perspective.  Passively scanning the
area around and below me, I began to get a grasp of what was going on.  But
before I get to that, I better explain some of the so called physics behind the
magical power of telepathy.  

Keep in mind this is highly theoretical and based entirely on my and my team's
research into the inner workings of telepathy and its kin.  We have not yet
worked out exactly how it all fits into the physics we are all familiar with,
but that should all come in due time.

Every body of organized matter generates a... I'll call it field of energy for
lack of a better term.  This field of energy represents the sum _state_ of that
body, and this field pretty much dictates what that body can do in respect to
the other bodies around it.  You can call it a life force, telepathic presence,
an aura, or what have you.  Everything has a distinguishable field that's
separate from its components, yet it is composed by those component's fields
and changes when they change.

Everything we consider matter has this field.  From a single electron, to an
atom, a molecule, a microbe, a red blood cell, a rock, a plant, an insect, a
bird, a human being, a body of water, an island, a continent, a planet, a sun,
a galaxy, and probably the entire universe if there is more than one universe
out there.  

For all matter, there's its mass and energy with its gravity and inertial
forces, but only cold matter (that's matter near absolute zero) is so limited
to those purely physical traits.  Warm matter is almost always undergoing
reactions of some sort, whether chemical, atomic, or electrical.  The more
diverse the reactions, the more descriptive the field, and at some point it
crosses the line where you could call it "alive".

(There's are also some pretty interesting aspects concerning dark matter too,
but if I tried to even begin to explain that here, I'd have another month long
min-war within my team of experts again.)

Most organic species of our planet can sense changes of certain components of
the life forces around them.  Take trees for instance.  Some types of trees
that are upwind from a forest fire inexplicably wilt.  Flocks of birds fly as
one, as do schools of fish swim as one.  Dogs, cats, and other animals
sometimes can sense an impending earthquake hours before they happen.

And then there are people.  Humans.  Homo Sapiens.  Some people can sense when
the phone is about to ring, others know they will be eating their favorite meal
when they get home from work that night.  There's the psychic, the empathic,
the telepathic, the very rare telekinetic and the extremely rare... uhm...
whatever-you-want-to-call-Joey-with-his-share-link-ic.  

Sorry Dave G.  The share link doesn't' quite fall under being telesomatic or
psychosomatic.  The share link only allows the balancing of states between two
or more bodies, not alteration of their states.

Telepathy is based on the complex fields we all generate that are not just an
aftereffect of the electrical impulses traveling through our body and brain.
These fields in a way actually define HOW the electrical impulses will travel
before they do, and in that sense they define how we think and react to
stimulus.

Emotion = chemistry with environmental factors.  Full empaths like the twins
and lessly myself can sense and to some extent manipulate that "spectrum" of
the human aura without needing our other senses.  But other senses do help a
lot, and its easier and more conventional to use them, especially in my case.

Telekinetics is something that I have been...  Exploring I suppose.  No, I'm
not causing things to float in mid air or anything of the sort.  For the
context of this discussion, think of telekinetics as the ability to alter the
cold matter physical traits of matter.  Making things float would require
altering the gravimetric properties of the mass, or alternatively the inertial
properties, but doing so for something as large as an object we can see
requires tremendous amounts of energy that the human body cannot supply very
long.  

That is not to say it doesn't have its uses.  Telekinetics are great healers,
for once they are trained to recognize foreign pathogens or cancerous tissues,
they can kill them directly by exciting key molecules within their own cellular
walls.  They tell me viruses are a bit trickier, and usually it is easier to
just help the patient's immune system combat them rather than tracking them
down themselves.  I'm nowhere near to being that good with telekinetics.  I'll
be more than happy to just get enough electrons to flow to make this damn
night-light bulb to light up.  They make it look so easy. <sigh>

Every human being alive has limited psychic, empathic, and telepathic
abilities, but very few ever realize them, let alone learn how to control or
use them.  Actually, that's a bit misleading.  Ninety nine point nine percent
of the human race does not have the...  capability to control these powers at
will.  However, most people do experience a few of them at least once in their
life time, and perhaps three percent of the mute population do so, a few maybe
even as often as twice a month.  There are so many random elements involved in
triggering these abilities to surface momentarily in a mute that it is
practically impossible to predict who, where, or when.

Anyway, getting back to the roof of the physics building at Central State, what
I sensed below me was that different people emitted different levels of what I
thought of at the time as telepathic energy.  What was significant was seeing
how four or five people in the building emitted much greater levels of energy
than the others, almost as if they were somehow generating the pickle field.

Feeling rather safe from the stair and ladder handicapped pickles, I decided to
test this theory and attempt to knock out the nearest pickle emitter to see if
the others around him were affected.  The pickles below me were quite agitated
by my sudden telepathic burst, but besides causing a temporary shortage of
blood to my target's brain to make him pass out, their fuming shouts of
"pickle-pickle" and mad scampering underneath me was the only effect.

"Man I sure could use Midge right about now," I muttered after walking the
perimeter of the roof and finding nothing but pickled people, some staring up
at me.  

A couple of robins swooping down from branch to branch gave me an idea, and in
a few moments I was flying over the campus with great speed.

Altitude definitely made a difference.  The closer I flew toward the ground,
the greater difficulty I had maintaining control over my borrowed feathered
body, and twice lost my link when a building of pickles came between me and the
bird.

I counted over twenty-five bodies lying out in the open on the campus, but none
were Joey, which I was partially thankful for.  A few I recognized as possibly
group members, but most I either didn't know, or couldn't see their faces.  I
was almost positive a few of them were dead from the way they laid, and this
made me even more desperate to find Joey.

Releasing the little sparrow I was using last, I closed my eyes and started
building up a pulse I hoped would reach Joey if ...  I didn't let myself finish
that thought, nor did I finish the pulse when I recalled the mental wandering I
had experienced lately while asleep.

I sat down on the blubber-like roof Indian style and focused on feeling Joey
out, recalling what his mind felt like, his body, his soul, even the scent of
his cologne, the emotion behind his smile, the fear he felt when fighting for
someone else's life...

'Wait a sec...  I never felt him feel that...  Joey?'

'Tim?!'

'Joey, where are you?'

'Safe.  Tim, find Suz.  I lost the link with her, but I can't leave them.'

'Leave who?'

'Neil, and some others.  They're hurt bad.  Share link helps.  Can't leave
them.  Find Suz.  Please.  You got to find her.  She was running from them.'

That was all I had to hear.  I didn't think to check the female bodies.  I had
been looking for Joey...  'Oh God, what if...'

As I rechecked the bodies, two things happened almost so quickly I almost
missed them.  First of all, a body I hadn't noticed before suddenly sprang to
his feet and bulldozed his way through a small crowd of pickles heading towards
the court yard beyond the building across the street from me. 

The second was the slight ripple of energy which flowed from the west towards
the area surrounding him, and then rippled back out in all directions. 

That's when the gentle pickle-pickle sounds stopped and all hell broke loose.
People began spilling out of the buildings screaming nonsensical phrases at the
terrified man, and it was when he flung his glasses at the crowd while lunging
at them, I recognized him as Rich, my favorite gorilla.

"NO!" I screamed as I attacked the crowd with blanket command after blanket
command, finding that while they weren't running away with terror like the
blanket commands were instructing them to do, it did cause enough of a
emotional conflict to stop their frenzied attack long enough for me to yell,
"RICH RUN!  I'LL COVER YOU!"

But where to run, that was the question.  Everywhere I could see mad
bloodthirsty students and staff spilled out of the surrounding buildings, none
of which were the least bit slowed down by steps or even by each other.  For
several moments it looked completely hopeless for Rich.

Rich wasn't about to go down without a fight, and seeing this made me focus my
attention to helping him take down as many as he could.

And I wasn't alone.  The telepathic fog all but dissipated when the pickle
spell ended and the mad crowd spell began, and from every direction trained
telepaths started picking off the possessed mutes one by one.

Rich was starting to falter, however, and no matter how hard I and the others
tried to knock the ones closest to him out, Rich kept getting pounded by the
next wave.

In desperation, I took direct control of a Eta and began protecting Rich
physically as best I could.  After handling an entire basketball team a year
before, I managed to gain control of about seventeen people and just formed a
wall around Rich.  The entire crowd was focused on Rich and Rich alone, and so
they only tried to climb over my human wall.  Not one of them seemed to think
about attacking one of my human planks to get to their objective.

Once the immediate threat to Rich was finally over, I focused my mind on
finding Suzi.  With the telepathic fog lifted, I was getting a very bad feeling
in my gut from my inability to locate her since she couldn't be very far away.

I had to find her.  I just had to find her.  With the amount of energy I was
putting into my search, I felt I should have at least felt a vibe from her even
if she had been transported to the other side of the moon.  Yet I felt nothing.
Nothing but a terrible emptiness.

As the last ripple of energy from the west released the remaining population
from its spell and faded from my senses, an all-new emergency presented itself.
Thousands of mutes were awakening to a scene that quickly caused a huge panic,
interfering with not just my own search for Suzi, but the group's attempts to
help the seriously injured.

But it wasn't until someone realized that people were running away not just to
get out of harms way, but to report what happened that containment became the
number one priority.  Since I wasn't getting anywhere with all the confusion
going on around me, I helped out the best I could, blanketing as many people as
I could to forget the strange events of the day and to go about their normal
business ignoring anything out of the ordinary.

It wasn't enough.  The sight of ambulances was welcome, but the police cars and
even worse, the media made me glad I wasn't apart of the group, and therefore
wasn't my problem.

Suzi's unknown location weighed heavily in my gut.  I had all but given up on
finding her alive when after things had settled down and I gave the entire
campus a full sweep, I still had not found any trace of her.

I rushed back to my apartment to try one last thing before giving up, and that
was a dream walk.

Dream walk.  I didn't know what else to call it.  I seemed to have greater
resolution while asleep, and hoped that even if she was dead I would find her
that way.

Before laying down on the bed, I looked myself in the mirror and simply said,
"This is not a joy ride.  This is for Suzi.  You know what you have to do.
Don't fail her."

I can't say I actually fell asleep completely, and there wasn't the usual
imaginative transition to the world of symbols.  Just the great expanse of
minds all around me in every direction, a great number of them unusually
disturbed, but that wasn't my concern right then.  I was only interested in
finding one mind.  One particular mind.

I floated in between minds of different spins and states, searching for
something familiar.  Slowly at first, then running, I searched with a careful
haste between the different bushes and trees in what became a great forest.

My legs were just starting to tire when I thought I smelt her briefly in the
wind.  I pounced to a stop, then with my nose and tail up high, I filtering out
all the natural forest scents and focused on finding Suzi's flowery scent.

It was there, but only just.  I carefully circled around with increasing
radiuses until I could discern from which direction it came from, then very
carefully made my way through the undergrowth, several times having to stop and
backtrack to regain the scent.

The scent lead me to a dark corner of the forest where dead trees surrounded a
patch of total blackness, reminding me of skeleton warriors guarding an evil
magician's treasure.  My tail fell from the sense of death all around me, my
worst fears apparently coming true.

I had to know.  I had to find her.  If not for me, for Joey.  So with unsteady
legs I slowly treaded forward, following the sweet flowery smell inside the
hollow dark center of death itself.

My senses deadened, and I felt increasing resistance to my advance inside.  But
her odor was growing ever stronger, and even though I was quickly struggling
just to inch forward, I could almost feel her...

The dream dissolved as I doubled my efforts to push through the barrier between
us.  I was physically straining my muscles, sweating and breathing heavily,
just as if I was truly pushing something very heavy up a steep incline.  The
sound of my blood rushing through my veins was only a gentle reminder of the
intensity of telepathic energy I was generating to keep the forward momentum to
my probe.

Finally I was through enough to feel her mind, to touch her mind, finding it
simply asleep.  I just barely managed to awaken her before the strain of
pushing against whatever it was stabbed me in the center of my brain and I lost
my lock on her.

I was just finishing my cusses and wiping my strain induced tears intending to
go back and find out where she was when out of the blue I felt her presence pop
up half way across campus.

Just as I opened a two way with her, a pulse of telepathic energy rolled out
from the west like a fast moving storm.  The two way broke and as people all
around campus began surging with the pickle-pickle spell again, I lost my fix
on Suzi all together.

I ran out of the apartment and crossed the street dodging a couple of cars and
a shuttle bus to reach the taller apartment building on the other side.
Thankful that the building had an elevator, I waited impatiently for the damn
thing to reach the main floor, then rode it to the top floor where I raced to
the roof's maintenance hatch where a volunteer was already prying it open for
me.

The building was only five stories, but between it being outside the pickle
spell's influence and the vastly reduced number of people inside the campus, I
was able to penetrate the telepathic dampening effects of the pickle spell and
hijacked one of its victims.

By jumping from pickled mind to pickled mind, I surveyed the general area where
Suzi had been and found nothing.  Fearing it had been no accident that the
pickle spell had restarted when Suzi had come out of hiding, I located the
closest group member and opened a two way with them.  What I learned made me
very anxious.

Whoever was doing this was after Joey's coin.  Once they realized that, Sarah
came up with a plan to locate and trap the attacker, using the coin as bait and
Joey's share link to Suzi as the line and hook.  The share link wasn't effected
by the telepathic fog the pickles caused, and Suzi would appear to be the least
threatening of the bunch both physically and telepathically.

The plan fell apart when the pickles attacked the medical complex before they
were ready.  Suzi and Rich were already making their way towards what they had
labeled the Cloak building when the pickles broke through the medical complex's
doors and stormed the first floor of the building.  It was during that chaos
that someone started shooting and a stray bullet hit Neil as he and Joey were
retreating to the stairs.  

Because the bullet's damage to Neil's body was, to a limited extent, shared
with Joey and Suzi, Joey instinctively killed the share link, but found he
couldn't restore it to Suzi when he relinked to another voice.

Somehow, Suzi managed to keep the pickle spell from taking control of her long
enough for Rich to get her to the new construction site which was their
destination to begin with.  After learning that a wood existed which telepathy
could not penetrate, Sarah apparently had someone find a supply of this wood
and was having a new facility built with it incorporated into the structure's
furthest interior room's walls.  This was the Cloak building, and despite the
building only having been started the previous week, the wood was already on
the lot.

Rich had to not only build Suzi a protective box out of that wood, but also
fight off the constant threat of pickles accidentally tripping over the
foundation and falling inside the two foot wall what otherwise held the small
mob of angry pickles at bay.

I apparently had telepathically burrowed in through one of the small air slots
Rich had made so Suzi wouldn't suffocate.  Rich had guarded her until the
pickles rushed him, and after circling the area to make sure they were leaving
Suzi's box alone, Rich took off to get help before they could overwhelm him.
It was after a long game of hide and play dead that Rich reached the area I was
in and got mobbed by the angry crowd.  

The news that Suzi was out of her protective box was not what the group wanted
to hear.  They were still licking their wounds and trying to keep the lid on
things, and with Joey having left with Neil and a few others for the hospital,
they assumed there was no way of tracking Suzi to the attacker's location.

I quickly corrected them on that assumption.  If I could find Suzi while she
was inside a shielded box, I could find her now, I told them.  I also explained
that the energy causing the pickle spell seemed to be coming from the west, so
whatever their plans, they should take that in consideration.

At that point I was politely told to butt out, that it was a group affair and
my help was not needed.  When I tried to argue with the guy, he said he was
sorry but he had his orders, and I had mine.

One of the things I disliked the most about that rat every group member had in
their head was the way it made them follow their instructions in a time of
crisis without hesitation.  Yes, I could see the advantages to this, but at the
same time this gave Sarah a hell of a lot of power.  There were safeguards
built in to make sure she or anyone else couldn't use this for their own
personal gains, but still... She was human.  She could make mistakes.

And so could I, I knew.  I stood on that roof staring at the western sky,
teetering on the verge of casting off the self-imposed commands of not
interfering while attempting to determine what was being done to find Suzi.
This madness had already claimed six lives, maybe more.  I couldn't stand the
thought that I was helpless to protect Suzi from being the seventh.

Searching my feelings, I found there were things I could still do that wouldn't
be considered interfering, yet wouldn't be just standing around leaving
everything to Sarah's already blotched plan.  Finding an Eta as far west as I
could reach in the murky pickle zone was difficult to say the least, but with a
little help from my eyes in the sky I managed to find one and form a link.

Within seconds of establishing control over my borrowed body, a bolt of
concentrated telepathic energy cut my link like an ax cutting a twig in two.
It had startled me, but I quickly reformed another link to another able body
nearby, and this time paid careful attention to where the bolt came from.

Oh, whoever they were, they were good.  The bolt came from a slightly different
direction, but it was still west from my rooftop.  Three more links gave me an
approximate location, but without a stable link to someone in the area, I
couldn't figure out what else I could do with this information.

What I needed was someone who I could direct to the source without losing
contact with them and could shield themselves from the pickle spell.  My
choices were very slim.  I had Rich or Perry, a group member, or some Joe Smo
off the street.  

Rich's and Perry's immunity was ideal in that they couldn't be pickled, but
that strength was also their handicap.  I couldn't tell them where to go if
they couldn't receive my thoughts.

Since all the group members knew I was not to interfere, I was certain none of
them would help, not even my drinking buddies.  Of course I wouldn't have asked
them in the first place since they weren't experienced enough to go into combat
like this.  

I had already tried the Joe Smo idea, so without much choice I did a little
mind hopping over to the old admin building.

Everyone inside except Perry was pickled of course.  He had locked the
entrances, bared the doors at the top of both stairwells, and had the entire
bottom floor to himself.  Unfortunately he was apparently napping in his office
at the time, and was completely oblivious to my shouts from both the outside
and the upstairs.

I ended up calling him on the phone.  Man, if he isn't the crankiest person
when awakened from a nap.  I didn't even get a word in before he hung up, and
when I tried calling back, the phone just kept ringing.  (Apparently he ripped
the phone cord out of its jack and just went right back to sleep.)

So I only had two options left.  Remove the commands that kept me in the groups
confidence and go myself, or persuade Rich Bugle to help me.  I decided to try
the latter first despite my doubts he would even consider it.

Rich was holed up in the medical complex getting his cuts and bruises tended to
while recovering from a slight concussion.  I couldn't mind hop into there
since all the mutes had been kicked out of the building the moment the pickle
spell stopped the first time, and to hop into a group member wasn't permitted.
So I used the old faithful telephone again after looking up the extension
number from a directory Joey had given Suzi months ago.  Mind you, I had to
have someone break into her apartment to get it, but I didn't think Suzi would
mind in this instance.

"Rich, I know this is a lot to ask, but Suzi needs your help."

"Suzi?  Who is this?"

"Uhm...  The guy from the roof."

"The guy...  You saved my life."

"Yeah, I guess.  Look.  There isn't much time.  Joey told me to find Suzi, and
I will, but right now she could be walking right into the hands of enemy, and
without you..."

"Alright..  What do I do?"

"So you'll help me?"

"I was supposed to protect her and I couldn't.  If you can get me to her, I'll
do what I can."

"Cool.  Okay.  Now all we need is a radio or something so we can communicate.
Any ideas?"

Five minutes later, I met Rich out back in another borrowed Eta, he bringing
the walkie-talkies and I the transportation.

"I can't ride that!" he immediately objected when he saw the motorcycle.

"Why not?  Just think of them as a big fast noisy bicycle."

"Fuck that.  There has to be something else."

"Nothing that can cut through the court yards and in between buildings," I
said, handing him a helmet.

"But I've never even been on a motorcycle before," he said, handing me my
walkie-talkie and hesitating before putting on the helmet.

"All right.  Let me think a second," I sighed.

Reaching out to the nearest pickles, I picked a freshman girl whose petite body
suited me, grabbed control over her and took off running for the nearest
stairs.  The nice thing about me being so far away was, I could safely blanket
the other pickles in the area without other pickles getting worked up.
Unfortunately, it wasn't easy to keep a lock on my borrowed bodies with so many
pickled minds between us and I momentarily lost my lock on the first body.

I have to give Rich credit.  He had fast reflexes.  By the time I reestablished
my hold over my Eta, Rich had him in a sleeper hold.

"Stop!" I cried from my other body as she turned the corner.  "I've got control
over him again!"

"Who are you?" he said warily, loosening his strangle hold just a tad.

"I'm your chauffeur," I had the freshman girl say while throwing her arms and
hands over her head and striking a pose.  "You like?"

"Kinda...  small, aren't you?"

"The lighter we are, the faster we are," I said grouchily, her hands now on her
hips.  "I could have picked this skinny freckled face nerd boy, but I thought
you'd appreciate a feminine figure to grope as we rode."

"Thanks, but I'd rather have someone like him as a riding partner into battle,"
Rich said while passing the helmet to my Eta body.

"You don't understand.  I can't hold a link with anyone once we get kind of
close.  That's why we need the walkie-talkies.  I can only drive you so far,
then you're going to have to take over.  The girl is just to give you a chance
to get used to the bike a little before you have to drive it yourself."

"Great.  So I'm going in without any backup?" he said as I put the helmet on my
female head and we climbed on the cycle.

"I wouldn't say that.  I'll be watching you the whole time and I should be able
to knock out any ground resistance there is if they aren't shielded.  Besides,
the plan is to make sure Suzi doesn't get hurt and that they don't take her
with them.  We'll leave everything else to the group."

"What about the coin?" he shouted after I started the engine.

"To hell with the coin.  Six people have died over it already.  It's not..."

"All right, all right.  But just so you know, they found another one right
before it all started up again.  It's seven, not six."

"Fuck!  Hang ON!" I shouted as I peeled out.

Weaving our way through the walkways and the few pickles still wandering about,
I almost enjoyed the thrill and excitement of the ride.  It wasn't just the
ride that was exciting me either.  I realized it hadn't been such a great idea
to pick a small body for this huge gorilla of a man to cling to...  Just
shifting our weights back and forth in the turns was making me hornier by the
second.

I tried concentrating on showing him how to shift, and once he seemed to get
the feel for it, I rode the remaining five-minute journey struggling to keep my
arousal under control.  That actually got easier the farther we went due to the
increasing difficulty of maintaining the link with her body at a level that
wouldn't draw the attention of the visiting team players.

By the time I stopped and got off, my control over her body was reduced to
operating her a lot like a robot.  I could see through her eyes, hear through
her ears, and had enough sensory information to keep her balance and direct her
arms and legs, but I was disconnected from the rest of her body and never knew
if he actually did take a quick grope before I got off the bike.

Once Rich got going, I released my hold over her completely and concentrated on
watching him and feeling Suzi out.

Bolts of telepathic energy carrying command symbols started hailing down on
Rich a minute later as he got closer.  I doubt Rich was even was aware of them,
and they didn't have the slightest effect, but I still held my breath while I
waited to see if they would.

The energy flowing from the west surged a moment, then stopped, but within
seconds of feeling the reduced strain to my telepathic faculties, I felt a
probe targeting me personally.

If I hadn't prepared the fake personality before hand, there was no way I could
have raised it before the probe's querying symbol payload reached my mind.

My fake personality was constructed to appear to be a zombie acting as a
conduit for hiding the true location of a telepath.  Considering that is what
this person or persons had done when scouting out the campus weeks before, they
wouldn't be surprised to find someone else using the same trick.

What I hadn't considered was they had a counter to this form of protection, but
luckily they just didn't do it right.  Before I knew what was happening, they
used an old trick of mine, releasing a small amount of my own urine into my
bloodstream which made me very faint and sick as a dog.

Telepathy can't stop the effects of blood poisoning, but I wasn't unconscious,
and after a few minutes I recovered enough to form a link with another pair of
eyes in the sky.

Rich was getting pretty good controlling that bike.  He was dodging the things
thrown at him by what few people there were that far away from campus, but he
apparently had lost his bearings and was heading a bit too far to the north.

I had trouble forming a link with someone near the walkie-talkie, and was
seriously sweating it while fighting the loss of my hold on my senses as my
body wanted to faint.  A jolt of adrenaline helped keep my grip on
consciousness, but it made my nausea worse, which was really getting hard to
ignore.

"Rich, over to you right more," I groaned into the walkie-talkie with a new
borrowed voice.  

"What?"

"You're going too far north.  Turn towards...  your right."

"You find Suzi yet?!"

"No, I've been...  busy."

"Fuck!  They're shooting at me!"

I zombified my borrowed body so it wouldn't wander away, then mind hopped as
far west as I dared before visually searching for Rich and the person with the
gun.

Instead I spotted Suzi and three Eta bodyguards heading up this hill away from
the activity.  Someone was somehow masking their minds from my telepathic
senses, but this also meant they couldn't be in active control of the four
zombies.  I would have detected the symbolic control streams if they had been
there.

Using my eyes in the sky, I strained my abilities as far as I dared in the
condition I was in to see if I could locate where Suzi and the others were
heading, and to my surprise my link with the barn sparrow was severed by bolt
directly below.

"Rich, I've found Suzi.  She's just reaching the top of the hill to your far
right."

Nothing.

"Rich, can you hear me?"

Nothing again.

"Look, if you can hear me, Suzi's heading over the hill by the three tall trees
to the south west.  Rich, do you read?"

"Damnit we're so close!" I moaned with my own mouth.

"A little of that help would be good right now!" the walkie-talkie spat
suddenly.

"Roger!"

"Well, in for a penny," I groaned while forming as many links with as many
birds in that area as I could and sending them in every direction.  I quickly
found Rich who had ditched the bike somewhere and was trying to get his breath
back after having just knocked out two men who must have come from the other
side of the hills.

Rich suddenly hit the dirt, and after circling several birds around the area, I
spotted the rifleman.  After unsuccessfully attempting to take control of him
directly, I just made his finger fire his riffle until he was out of shells.

"He's out.  Run while he's reloading!" I yelled into the walkie-talkie.

"Which way is Suzi?!"

"Southwest."

"Which fucking direction is that!"

"Look up!" I said as I put my birds into a V formation pointing towards the
hill where I last saw Suzi.

"Oh shit," I gasped as I felt multiple minds probe for me.

"Tim!  Are you doing that?" Terrance thought to me.

"That depends.  Doing what?"

"Never mind.  Just keep doing it!  You're distracting them."

"Okay..." I thought back to an already closed thought channel.

"God Damnit!  Will you fucking take that guy out!" Rich's voice screamed over
the walkie-talkie.

"Roger.  I'll do my best," I said nervously.

In order to break the hold over the rifleman, I would have to use a greater
amount of telepathic energy than I had been using which would be easily
traceable back to me.  Exposing myself to the enemy like that meant I would be
risking my life to help him.

But I reasoned that Rich was already risking his life, and he was doing this by
my suggestion.  I was responsible for his life, and if one of us was to die, I
should be the one.  Not that I wanted or planned to die, mind you.

Using my fleet of eyes in the sky, I got a fix on the rifleman, picked out the
faint control stream, and traced it back to its source.  Using the same
disabling trick as they had tried on me, I triggered the release of urine into
the man's blood, but I got the dosage right and he passed out instantly.

Rich didn't take any chances.  The moment the rifleman staggered and dropped
his gun, Rich leapt from his cover, hauled his ass across the field, and
tackled the poor dazed man, knocking him out cold.

I only had enough time to become a little queasy from Rich picking up the gun
and taking it with him before my eyes in the sky got disrupted one by one as I
felt an angry probe focusing upon me.

The single attack stream that followed the probe was surprisingly easy to
counter.  It wasn't very sophisticated; in fact it was almost insulting to have
to counter it at all as simple as it was. 

But what the stream lacked in sophistication, it nearly made up with just the
raw power driving it.  Normally I can push back an attack once I get synced up
with the symbol flow, but in this case, I barely could keep up.  The symbols
just came so damn fast.

I was actually starting to lose a little ground when there was an explosion of
telepathic activity in the hills just beyond my telepathic vision.  This
knocked my attacker off guard long enough for me push the intersection of our
two canceling symbolic streams well past the mid point between us, and at that
point the stream was cut off to prevent me from tracing it all the way back to
its source.

Huffing for breath, I sat up and took a moment to survey what was going on.

"Looks like the troops finally got their act in order," I muttered before
closing my eyes and reaching out to my eyes in the sky again.

"Rich.  Follow the birds.  I say again.  Follow the birds.  You're getting
close."

"Rich.  It looks like they're getting ready to leave.  I don't think they are
planning to take Suzi with them."

"Watch it when you get over the hill.  I think the three Eta's and Suzi will
try and jump you."

"Who has the coin?" Rich radioed back.

"Who cares?"

"Damnit bed wetter!  I'm not going to just let them get away with what they
came for!  Tell me who has the coin!"

"What are you going to do?  Shoot them?"

"If I have to!  Now tell me who has it!"

"I don't know!"

"Are you telling me the mighty Tim Brandon has lost his magical sight?!  I knew
Joey was exaggerating that you could see the stuff coming out of the coin from
a mile away."

I was stunned a moment by his revelation that he knew it was me, that he must
have known since the beginning.  But for some reason once the shock wore off,
he getting my last name wrong ticked me off.

"Fine!  It's the one in the chair!  The little one!"

I watched from above as Rich scrambled around the hill to come up behind a
tree, then I held my breath praying he wouldn't actually shoot as he took aim.

The person in the chair hadn't moved since I first spotted the group from
above, while the others had climbed into a minivan and were apparently fighting
off the group's combined attack from within there.

Rich kept taking aim, then looking over the gun at his target with both eyes,
then taking aim again.  He did this five or six times before crawling back away
from the tree several feet then rolling down the hill a bit to where he left
the walkie-talkie.

"Are you sure she's the one with the coin?"

"Yeah I'm sure!"

"I swear if you're lying to me, I'll beat the living shit out of you," he
threatened.

"Why would I lie about something like this?!"

"Because you know I can't shoot a little girl!"

"What?!"

"I can't shoot a little girl!"

I swooped one of my aerial eyes down for a closer look, then swooped down even
more when no one disrupted my link.

I landed my bird ten feet away from the small figure who was sitting in a wheel
chair, then carefully hopped closer studying the features not hidden behind the
impossibly black glasses she wore.

Rich was right.  It was just a little girl, probably no older than Tommy,
sitting there with the coin clasped between her hands that were otherwise
laying limp in her lap.  She didn't move, not even when I flapped my wings and
then did a little chirp that was a favorite of mine.

So I probed her.

Holy shit did she throw a hard punch!  I didn't even feel it coming.  The next
thing I knew, Joey was kneeling down beside me gently slapping my cheek to wake
me up.

"You all right?" Joey asked as I sat up with a killer headache.

"Uhgn...  What time is it?" I groaned, noticing it was dark out.

"A little after ten.  Can you stand?"

I spit a foreign object out of my mouth that must have blown in during my...
uhm... nap, then said, "I don't think I want to try.  Is Suzi okay?"

"She's fine.  She was bouncing off the walls worried about what happened to
you."

His voice was tired, but more than that, it was down.  That could only mean...

"Neil?"

"He lost a lot of blood and it was pretty scary for a couple of minutes, but
he's stable now."

"Oh.  Good.  For a moment I thought..."

"Seven people died, Tim, possibly more.  The police are all over the place
trying to make sense of what happened, it's all over the news, and now the FBI
is getting involved.  It's all over.  You and Suz should just pack up your
stuff and go home."

"You know neither Suzi or I are going anywhere without you."

"I know... But I wish I never brought you two into this."

I groaned a moment while rubbing my temples trying to reduce my pounding head,
then said, "It's been a long day.  You're tired, I'm tired, and I'm sure Suzi's
tired.  We're not going to make sense of things or make things any better while
we're like this."

"I have to go back to help Sarah in little bit.  I..."

"What?"

"I need someone to link to."

"Oh please yes.  This head is killing me."

Joey's emotions were raging a private war within him, and after over a minute
of silence passed without any sign of him forming a share link, I tugged on his
arm for him to sit down next to me and said, "Link, then talk."

"All right," he sighed.

As my headache faded and we traded our different kind of fatigues until they
were at equilibrium, my dulled empathic senses perked up and explained what was
going on inside Joey's head.

"How can you blame yourself for this mess?" I asked him incredibly.

"It was my coin she was after.  If I had just given it to her..."

"Like Sarah would have let you."

"Leave Sarah out of this!" Joey said defensively.  "She's done everything she
could do to protect us.  It isn't her fault we get attacked two or three times
a month by power hungry... thieves!"

"So that makes it your fault?"

"No..."

"Then why are you torturing yourself about it?"

"Because Neil got shot, I put Suzi in danger, and then I had you risk your neck
to finish what I had started."

"Let's just get some things straight here.  Did you in any way cause the gun to
go off that shot Neil?"

"Well... No."

"Did you order Suzi to be the hook for the bait?"

"You know no one can order her around like that."

"Did you volunteer her?"

"No!  She volunteered for it herself."

"Then when I risked my neck, I did it for her, not because you asked me to."

"Shit, I know all that.  I just...  If it wasn't for me, you, Neil, and Suzi
wouldn't have been here to get hurt in the first place."

"Next thing you'll say is if you hadn't come to Central state, bringing your
coin, those seven people wouldn't be dead."

"Shit...  You know, you're not helping by saying things like that."

"But by continuing that logic, those seven people wouldn't have died if I
hadn't given the coin to you in the first place."

"So now it's your fault.  That doesn't make it feel any better."

"So then does it matter whose fault it is?  Seven people are dead because we
made choices, innocent choices that no one can fault us for, that just so
happened to play a role in causing this mess.

"Besides, if it's anyone's fault, its John's."

"John's?" Joey queried, looking over at me.  "Oh...  Heh.  Yeah, I guess it is
all John's fault."

"He did find the damn thing."

"Well then... If your dad hadn't given you yours, John wouldn't have recognized
mine at the coin shop."

"Now why didn't I think of that," I chuckled.  "I guess your mom was right.
It's always the dad's fault."

Joey's grin faded, and despite in his heart he knew it really hadn't been his
fault, he still verbalized the strongest emotion he felt right at that moment.

"It should have been me."

There simply was nothing I could say to ease his suffering, and I knew it.  An
empathic link would have temporarily helped, but in the end that would only
delay Joey having to deal with this in his own way.

So I did what any normal person could do.  I hugged him, and nearly got the
shit squeezed out of me when he hugged me back.

Joey and I were both startled when Suzi kneeled down beside us, neither of us
having detected her coming up on the roof during the hug.  Worried, relieved,
and just a tad ticked off that we hadn't contacted her, Suzi waited patiently
several long moments as we just stared at her in stupefied shock, then punched
us both in the upper arms to get us to let her into the hug.

We not only took her into the hug, but Joey also formed a share link with her
with a block to prevent our own fatigue from affecting her.

"Damnit, why can't they just leave us alone?" Joey bellowed as we all suddenly
sensed the group's probes searching for them to give them the alarm.

"I'm going with you," I said as Joey made contact and queried for details.

"Timmy, I know you just want to h..." Suzi began.

"I think you better come," Joey interrupted her.

"Why?" I asked a bit nervously.

He looked at me with worried eyes and said, "The Cabal are on campus."

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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