More than twenty. Remember, I've planned these all out in advance. I mean, I'm apready planning the chapters for Book CDII. Granted, sometimes it changes when I actually write them. For instance, Abomination wasn't originally slated to die in Book L, I think it was.
But no more chapters tonight. Got to go to work in the morning.
New chapter.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
Mind Games
The next location was a museum.
Yarin, Noelle, and Terenia walked rather sedately. They were not disguised, and only Terenia could pass as human without a disguise. The museum was so eerily quiet that even the gentle clopping of Noelle's hooves reverberated almost ominously.
<Where
is everyone? Is this a human holiday?> Noelle asked, her tail quivering anxiously. Her stalk eyes were moving almost perpetually.
"Holiday? No," Terenia answered, "but there is probably a very good reason for the desertion of this museum. Perhaps they're simply in a nother part of it, a new exhibit, perchance."
"No, I cannot sense any other minds . . ." Yarin said. "Except for one."
"Very good, little telepath." Regineuros said. But she chose not to speak from her own mouth. The voice was a kid's.
The three RAFians came to a large room -- an atrium, really -- where the floor was littered eith skeletal reconstructions of long-dead beasts. But at the far end of the room, by a naked wall, were what the three could only assume were the museum's visitors or patrons or staff. Regineuros Confined stood before them.
It also appeared that a school group of indeterminate age were visiting on some sort of class trip. Possibly a different grade (or school altogether) than the one touring the power plant.
It was a boy who spoke. He had rather spiky, messy, brown hair, as if he were an anime character, and large, vacant, blue eyes. Though, upon observation of the rest of the group assembled, they
all had vacant eyes. Yarin was the only one of the three that knew and remembered the Unimind incident, and this was something eerily similar.
"Very good to have made it here," a silver-haired boy said, though his face remained blank, body unusually stiff, like a mannequin, and his hazel eyes were vacant.
"It certainly took you long enough," said a brown-haired girl with dark, vacant eyes. Her body, too, was stiff like a mannequin's and her face, too, was blank -- devoid of emotion.
"I swear it's just as creepy as last time," Yarin muttered.
<Last time?> Noelle questioned.
"Later," Yarin stressed.
"Can you speak on your own?" Terenia said, with an almost academic weariness.
"Yes, I can," she replied, speaking through a burly man in khakis and a dark blue shirt. His eyes remained vacant as the others, and it was not monotone, though his blank face did not show it. Terenia had no idea if that was even physically possible.
"I just
chose to refuse to deign to speak to you," she continued, switching to a teenaged girl with copious black hair and simple fashion choice. "Though I must ask --"
She switched to speaking to a blond boy, who was clearly small for his age, "How are you blocking my telepathic probes? How can you shield your minds from me like that? My mind is the apex mental compacity in all of creation. No mind is unreadable to me."
She switched to a frail-looking old man, "How'd you do it?"
The three RAFians said nothing, but stood their ground, undeterred by the creepiness of this daughter of Garrotik. They shared a glance with each other.
"Making plans, already?" Regineuros Confined said through a woman -- apparently a person on the museum's staff or one.of the kids' chaperones. "Tsk tsk tsk. Too bad it won't plan out."
"You can tell the future?" Terenia said, voice soaked through with skepticism.
"Yes," Regineuros lied, through a little redhead girl.
Noelle snorted at this very thought. <Maybe one
possible future, if you're speaking the truth at all."
"I am," she said, speaking through all her hostages at once.
It was Terenia's turn to snort derisively. "You're confused. It's the
past that's immutable, unchangeable. The future is
full of possibilities, ever flowing, ever changing. We are
not that foolish."
"Let's just get this thing done," Yarin said, wanely. "I think I may have left my Bunsen burner on at RAF."
Yarin tried to attack her telepathically, and found that she put up a better fight then he expected. But her control over the hostages began to wane slightly. Their eyes flickered between consciousness and vacancy. She couldn't divide her attention forever.
The fact that she was using the hostages in such a way could and would be used against her.
Yarin continued to telepathically push back against the Lady of the Mind, while Noelle was rapidly morphing into a Psycholeopterran and Terenia took out . . . a ruler. But Terenia spun the ruler like a baton and it expanded into a quarterstaff-sized, pole-like ruler. Terenia was deathly with her Ruler of Death.
The Lady of the Mind was equally distracted by Noelle (using the hypnotic powers of the Psycholeopterran) and Yarin (who did not relent in his telepathic assault), and Terenia wailed on her with this ruler-pole.
"Ruler of Death, extend!" Terenia said, before delivering the final blow, breaking Regineuros Confined and seemingly breaking her control over the hostages.
Terenia landed holding the ruler/quarterstaff behind her, as Noelle landed and demorphed.
"Don't get too complacent, it's not over," Yarin warned.
