After everything I’d done, everything I’d given up, and they were standing there, threatening me. Everyone was a potential enemy.Įveryone was capable of using their powers to hurt me.ĭamn them all. I couldn’t recognize anyone, only powers. A weight, a pressure, crushing me from all sides.
They fixed their stares on me, and I could feel paranoia building. My head hung, but I could see the eyes of the people around me through the clairvoyant. I could connect the dots, recall the powers I was up against, and I could form strategies. I could survey the battlefield, interpret powers, put two and two together. Taking action, moving… easier so long as I had an objective. I knew it, and I could see the dividing lines more clearly. I was settling into the end-state of my transition. There were a lot of fates worse than death. Inflict horrible tortures, kill me, fates worse than death. People here, almost every single one of them, they had a reason to pay attention to me, and the attention wasn’t good attention.Īny of them, all of them, they could attack me at a moment’s notice. People I might pass on the street wouldn’t pay me any mind. This… it was all ominous, vaguely threatening. I couldn’t recognize anyone, put a finger on them as familiar or unfamiliar, enemy or ally. This darkness around me, it was an absence of illumination, an absence of any light that could clarify and make sense of things. Strangers like the masked man who broke into a house. Strangers who had connections to me, who I still didn’t know. Hundreds of people, and they didn’t feel any goodwill towards me. People noticed, and others paid attention to the noticing.
To turn their eyes towards me, because the only open space in the area was the space around me, the radius of my power, and it drew the eye. All of the survivors, returning to the battlefield to see it for themselves. Thirty, forty, fifty people, more appearing every second, streamed through portals. Resistance to my efforts, getting nowhere, and always slowly, inevitably sinking. Trying to analyze people, to parse them, to identify them, it was like being in quicksand. I couldn’t think straight because I couldn’t think.
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