thegingernut

  Irene was waiting for me on the other side of the bst door. "How did it go? Did she give you any trouble" she asked. "It went well" I noted. "You didn't make any deals with her, did you" she asked with concern. I sighed. "That's my business" I said. "She's pure evil you know" she said. "I'm not unaware of that. Did you know she was descended from a Nazi?" I said. "What's a… Nazi?" asked Irene. "If I had to make a list of the top ten most evil things to have ever existed and not mention the Nazis, it would call my own character into question" I responded. "That sounds bad".

  "They were obsessed with their own exceptionalism. They believed themselves the master race that would drive all other races to extinction" I exposed. "What's a race?" she asked. "Basically what colour your skin is. Whether you're white, bck etcetera" I expined. "That's an odd thing to feel superior about" noted Irene. "They killed about 20 million people to prove their racial superiority" I said. "Jesus!" gasped Irene.

  "Why didn't someone do something about them?" she asked. "They did. But the thing is, after the war there was a lot of untapped talent lying around, and the United States wanted them working for them before the Russians could get to them. So many of the Nazis were forgiven of their crimes and put to work in various projects for uncle Sam. Including (if I'm not mistaken) General Wasserv?gel's grandfather" I noted.

  "So you know to be careful how you deal with someone like that!" Irene demanded. "Don't worry. I know what I'm doing" I said. "And what would that be?" she asked. I pointed to the wall and then grabbed my ear by the lobe and wiggled it. She tilted her head in confusion. I sighed. "Never mind".

  "Oh, they forgot to take your power binder off again" she groused. "If it was a problem I'd have pointed that out" I said reasonably. "You're a strange kid Vanessa" she said. "I'm aware" I replied. I walked further into the cell. Charlotte and Peter were pying catch with a watermelon. Charlotte was now wearing a Barbie t-shirt and a floofy pink skirt. "Vanessa!" she called and the watermelon nded somewhere beside her. She ran over and hugged me. Tightly.

  "I'm sorry I scared you, please don't hate me!" she gasped. I shot Irene a gnce. "Charlotte, drop her" Irene chided. She dropped me immediately. I gasped for air. She might not be big but she must have been able to tear that watermelon in two if she had a mind to. "Its fine. Not your fault nobody bothered to tell me magic was real" I noted.

  "Want to py catch?" she asked. "Absolutely not!" I gasped, remembering the horrifically violent soccer game Leah had been apart of. "Why not?" she gasped. Right. How to excuse myself from catch to the death without letting on my previous knowledge of beastshifters? "That thing looks really heavy. Pretty sure you'd break my ribs if you threw that at me" I responded. "What's wrong with a few broken ribs?" she asked. I gave her Dad a horrified look. He caught on to my implication. "Its no big deal for beastshifters! We heal quick" he said defensively. I sighed. "Fair enough. I don't".

  "Really?" asked Charlotte. I pointed to the bruise where General Wasserv?gel had punched me. "Wait, is that a bruise?" she asked. I nodded. "I didn't know they could turn that colour" she said. "Your body must skip a few steps of the healing process" I hypothesised. "So how long does it take for broken bones to heal?" she asked. "Six to eight weeks I believe? Though it depends on your age. Older peoples' bones could take years to fully mend, if they ever mend fully" I said. "That's awful" she gasped. "Yes. It is. So please be careful not to break me. I'm kinda fragile" I responded.

  "Okay… lets watch TV instead!" she said brightly. "Sounds good. You got any of the Barbie movies?" I asked. "What's a… Barbie movie" she asked. My stomach sank. "You're… literally wearing a Barbie t-shirt" I noted. "Oh! Is that what it says? I didn't notice. I just put it on because it was pink" she said. "Cool. Maybe I'll show you some of the Barbie movies one day. But in the meanwhile… what do you have?" I asked.

  It was a smorgus board of copaganda and military-auto-erotica movies and shows. CSI. The Bay Transformers movies. NCIS. Independence Day. Law and Order. Stargate SG1 and Atntis. Chicago PD. (No Chicago Med for some reason). Forrest Gump. I actually ughed upon seeing paw patrol. There was a shelf of pystation games too. More Military propaganda. Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Battlefield. The yer of dust on the tops of the disc boxes bought me some hope in humanity.

  She grabbed a disc of NCIS and loaded it into the pystation. I wonder if that whole military supercomputer thing was a hoax so the army could acquire a bunch of pystations to get children used to violence. Not likely. My father had tried the same gambit and had himself noted the violence wasn't realistic enough to properly desensitise someone. They should have hired him on. He could have saved the taxpayer millions! Assuming my theory was correct which I really didn't think it was.

  "My favourite character is Abby because she acts funny!" mentioned Charlotte. I tried to remember my own experience with the show. It wasn't exactly something I seeked out after my great escape and my father had never been big on TV to begin with even before he forswore all of civilization. He thought the government was using it to control the popution, which wasn't completely wrong. I realized I had only seen clips of it in a youtube video essay about copaganda.

  Okay. Maybe I should actually watch some of it before shitting on it. I wound up agreeing with Charlotte about Abby. She fit the manic pixie dream girl archetype. She deserved better than to be a supporting character on a copaganda show honestly. I don't think Charlotte cared for how action heavy this library was. I'm pretty sure if I showed this poor kid Barbie she'd die of refeeding syndrome. Perhaps some Charmed or Winx club to wean her off the pure macho nonsense first and prevent a shock to her system.

  We watched NCIS for hours. It wasn't all bad I supposed. Gibbs was pretty tolerable as cops go. Then again, I suppose that was the point of the show. To convince us the the cops were just like us really. I started to wish I'd had my new monster high boxset on me when I'd been captured. But I doubt they'd have let me keep it. And it might have been broken in the crash.

  Irene came over every so often to give us something to eat. It was nice to veg out with Charlotte and just forget the fact I was being imprisoned by the government at the behest of the descendent of a Nazi. I wonder what role her Grandfather pyed in the genocide. Presumably he was part of their project to harness the occult to win the war. Which if successful could have ended many billions of more lives.

  Surely he had bad intentions. But was it really right of me to assume the worst of General Wasserv?gel based on her grandfather's political beliefs? I mean she did have children kidnapped but maybe she did really have the country's best interests at heart… ALRIGHT! That's enough copaganda for one day! The sky had turned bck. "I'm off to bed" I said. "Awwww! But its still early!" whined Charlotte.

  Damn. When did I become a grownup? I mean my childhood had been ruined seven ways to Sunday by being dragged out into the mountains for hardcore manliness training but I thought I'd held onto at least a little bit of rebellious spirit. But right now, all I wanted was to sleep and that felt sickening.

  My dreams were no kinder than yesterday. But they'd lost their vivid edge. My sleep wasn't repeatedly disturbed. Just shitty. My father didn't show up again thankfully. And private Aaron's face was fading. I still relived killing him, but he was fading from a person with dreams to a faceless figure. A part of me was disturbed that I could so quickly forget the first person I had properly killed. The rest of me was gd for the uninterrupted rest.

  ---

  After breakfast I was called to meet the General again. I gave Irene a reassuring smile and entered the airlock. On the other side I presented my wrists for cuffing and the guard got mad at me for taking the bracelet into the enclosure again. He then escorted me to a medical smelling room. General Wasserv?gel was waiting for me.

  "Now, I have to warn you that everyone so far who we have performed this experiment upon has died a painful and horrific death. Do you still wish to proceed?" she stated. I gave a dark smile. "Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Can't make a master race without breaking a few lesser beings, right?" I said. She frowned. "I'm not a butcher, child. I wouldn't sacrifice your life without good reason. That would be a waste. You can't make an omelette without time and care either. And I assure you there are less painful ways to commit suicide if that's your goal" she observed.

  "My mind is made up. Lets make history" I said. "Alright" she smiled. It was a chilling smile. "Just one little thing first. We need to impnt this in your arm" she said. She held up a little integrated circuit. "A GPS tracking chip?" I asked. She smiled. "Observant as ever. If the power you develop turns out to be teleportation we don't want you using it to escape. I'm sure you can understand that I do not wish to set a vanishing serial killer loose on my country" she noted.

  I gave it a moment's thought. I could have it removed on the way out. It was a small concession for what would theoretically be checkmate in a single move. I drew my mouth into a furious grimace. I ground my teeth a bit. Then I let out a sigh. "Fine, I get it" I conceded.

  She had me sit down on a metal bench. "Now this is going to pinch a bit" said a man in a white medic's uniform. "No anesthetic" I said. "What?" gasped the medic. "No anesthetic. That shit's for pussies" I said. (Not true. In actuality I needed my wits about me for what was going to come next. But that answer might let on I had bigger things pnned)

  The medic cut into my arm with a razor sharp scalpel. It hurt don't get me wrong, but not unbearably. Clean cuts don't tend to sting much. I did scream as the little impnt was slid into my flesh. Having a blunt, foreign object shoved into your flesh does hurt, and there's no amount of machismo that can get around that.

  The medic let go of the impnt halfway in in surprise. I gave him a dirty stare. "Do. Your. Job" I snapped through tears. "Of course!" he squeaked. Another 30 seconds of horrible pain and it was in. He then began carefully stitching the wound closed. That part wasn't so bad. Just a hundred back to back vaccinations really.

  General Wasserv?gel let out a chuckle. "You wouldn't be the first to refuse anesthetic out of a sick sense of machismo. But few continue to reject it after the pain actually starts" she ughed. I shrugged. "A super soldier can't be afraid of pain" I stated. "Have you had any sort of military training?" she asked. I considered and then gave an honest answer. "My father had funny ideas about raising children" I said. "He sounds like a wonderful man" she ughed. "He had his moments" I noted darkly.

  "Okay. Shall we get started on the experiment?" she asked. "Very well" I replied. She sat me down in a chair and pced a metal bowl on my head secured with a helmet chin strap. "We're going to start with 100 millivolts and work our way up" expined the general. "The machine turned on. I closed my eyes and cleared my head. Reduced my own body's energy output to virtually zero. I was getting good at that with practice.

  "I could feel a reserve of energy from the helmet. A fraction of a fraction of even what I was producing now. I wouldn't even feel it most of the time probably. "More" I said. It intensified, but it still wasn't much. "More" I said.

  It took about 20 "More"s to reach my own natural level. I could feel it threatening to slip into me through the helmet. Like a leaky water vessel. But not one drop slipped through. "More" I called. And again. And yet again.

  "Fascinating! Do you not feel anything?" asked the machine's operator after a while. "Not a thing. Increase the voltage" I lied. I felt this time that it had been upped by many more steps than before. Now that leaky water vessel was a mighty ke, and my willpower was barely keeping it at bay. Alright, this should be enough. Gently, like a butterfly unleashing the fires of hell, I tapped into all that energy.

  I felt a sharp pain in some part of my brain. Probably not a good sign, but I wasn't unconscious so it didn't change my machinations in any meaningful way. I felt the minds of the general and the medic and the operator. That wasn't something I could normally do. I couldn't really detect anything about them but I could roughly tell which direction they were. Which would be useful if I couldn't also see them with my own eyes. I sent out a loud but empty thought. A thunderous mental silence.

  And it bounced when it met other minds. Carrying information about them that might have helped me if I was a bat. Maybe I could learn to read minds this way with many years of practice. Just about all it told me right now was how many people were in any given direction. A device in the corner went "bing". "Do you feel something Vanessa? Do you feel something now?" asked the general with undisguised excitement. Oh yeah. I felt the entire gameboard, spread out beneath me. I shaped my thoughts into practiced shapes that I had spent much of the day yesterday practicing while watching NCIS. And then with a sweep of my metaphorical palm I rearranged the entire game board.

  I felt the echoes of my unspoken pn, screaming in my mind like someone was gouging microchips into their flesh. I felt several more dangerous sounding lurches in my brain. "STOP THE MACHINE" I thought. The well of power dried up in an instant and then the echoes striking my brain sent a great surge of power back up the circuit. I bnked out.

  ---

  I woke up in my bed in the holding area. The headache was indescribable. I groaned. I peeled my eyes open. It was evening. I dragged my way out of bed and wandered over to the barbecue. Irene was cooking up a storm. Upon seeing me she threw down her cooking implements. "Vanessa! Are you alright?" she asked. "Aspirin!" I gasped. "What?" she demanded. "Aspirin. Ask the guards!" I groaned. Irene shot a look to Charlotte, who ran over to a window on the opposite side to the cells. She returned a minute ter. "The guards say give them 15 minutes" reported Charlotte.

  I grabbed a jug of juice and began chugging it down. It was refreshing. Maybe this was just a dehydration headache and not a "fried bits of my brain in a mad bid for power" headache. I began listing US state capitals aloud to check for cognitive decline. I managed all of them by the time the guards got back with the aspirin. It was deposited in one of those security trays they use in prison and all night supermarkets. Charlotte handed me a half used packet with 4 tablets remaining. I popped 2 with a gulp of juice. I sighed. Hopefully that will make the headache go away some time in the next half hour. Or at least shut the fluff up.

  "Thanks" I told Charlotte. "What happened" demanded Irene. "Just a little experiment to see if they could awaken my tent powers" I replied. "THAT'S INSANE!" cried Irene. "The guards talk about those experiments sometimes. People have died trying to gain magic that way" she added. I shrugged. "Its my life to gamble with" I said. Irene spped me. It made my ears ring and my eyes water. "OW!" I sobbed.

  "You risked your life for something as stupid as magic? You're an idiot" she snapped. "We're not getting out of here with your powers alone" I snapped back. "Getting out of here is not something I want at the cost of your life. As a guardian I couldn't LIVE with myself if something happened to a child under my care!" she cried.

  I took a few calming breaths and a swig of juice. "I'm under nobody's care but my own. I no longer *trust* anyone else to take care of me. Not after my father… And as my own *sole* caretaker I value liberty over life. I've made that decision before and every minute since has been bonus time as far as I'm concerned. I don't care if I die trying. We are getting out of here and we are getting out of here soon. I promise"

  I gasped for air. Irene fell into a sad silence. I noticed there was a half cold burger on my pte and quickly dug in. After a minute of silence: "Would you sacrifice Peter or Charlotte to make your escape" she asked. I just about choked. "Never! Their lives aren't mine to py with" I said. "Then lets hear your escape pn then" she said. I shook my head and pointed to the wall then wiggled my ear. "What does that gesture mean?" she asked. I sighed. "It means I'm not ready to escape yet".

  "Do you feel any different after being experimented on?" she asked. "I don't know. Right now I have a thumping headache and I don't think I'll be doing any magic until it clears. When its gone I'll see if I can do magic. Until then I just want to drink juice, eat hamburgers and then get some sleep"