Piecing Together The Past Part 2

After eating, everyone stared impatiently at Wanda, waiting expectantly on the information she had promised. Having intentionally eaten her food at a slow pace to give herself sufficient time to think through the information, Wanda finally finished her meal and threw the box that her food had been delivered in away before sitting down and addressing the others. Smiling at their impatient stares, Wanda chided, "Us older people have learned that rushing through your food and not taking time to enjoy it will eventually teach your body to rush the food through the system. When that happens you will one day be sitting on the toilet longer than you get to spend at the dinner table every day."

After they each reacted with giggles, scoffs, or sighs, Wanda then walked over to Dawn, gave her a long hug, and said, "I'm sorry but this information is going to be hardest for you to handle." And, when Dawn started to respond, Wand placed her finger over Dawn's mouth and continued, "Shh! I will tell you in a second but I had to offer you some comfort before I began."

She then walked back to her seat, sat down, and started, "To begin with, Dawn, the lady that Rachel and Holly's mother came in contact with was your mother. Sadly, you had just been born a couple months before the accident and your medical genius dad was confident she would recover and mister paranoid hypochondriac did not want to take newborn you to the hospital because he thought exposing you to the hospital environment might cause you to contract a cold, the flue, or any other major virus he could think of."

Shocked, Dawn started crying and, after taking hold of her emotions so she could continue to find out more about her mom, she wiped her eyes with a napkin and nodded for Wanda to continue.

Wanda sympathetically smiled and informed her, "Me, being a trained doctor before we had started the company, along with your dad's paranoia is how I ended up being your full time nurse, maid, and babysitter as you were growing up."

She then continued, "When we first started out we would all work as hard and as long as we could on whatever project we thought we could accomplish. When we were working on the healing drug we have now we had all been working on testing the results and verifying the chemistry almost all day for weeks and were only seeing a slight increase over other drugs available. Then we were working all the way till just shy of midnight one day and were all talking about how we were so tired and needed to go get some sleep after we got done with the current test. However, we were trying to verify the chemistry when Susan's hand started trembling and all it took was a drop of the chemical she was holding to miss the beaker and get close to the burner and it caused the test equipment to violently explode.

When it exploded, the glass at first severely cut several of us. When we all miraculously healed after a couple of minutes we thought that it was because of the drug and we had made a scientific breakthrough. The only abilities I had known of Lisa having was the listening and mover abilities, but after learning about Stephan's ability, I think Dawn's mom also had the builder ability and changed the drug to heal us faster because, in addition to it's incredibly fast healing rate, The children of the women involved in that accident later all had this new gene that we found out today enables them to absorb energy. And I think she may have unconsciously included it in that batch due to already being tired and using the last of the energy she had to change the drug to heal us. We thought at the time that with her being right next to it when the explosion occurred that it was what had knocked her unconscious. But to me it didn't have the right signs. I had always thought that I was wrong but after today though I am certain that she had used so much of her energy that she passed out like Jessica did earlier.

In the next couple of months Dawn's mom, Susan, and two others got pregnant and they all had had their kids before the next accident occurred. In that accident we had again been working hard all day, but this time the heat in the lab wasn't working so we tried to heat the lab up by lighting the Bunsen burners. Not thinking about the safety of it, we had Susan turning the gas on to all of the burners while we came behind her with lighters to ignite them. We had all gotten our burners lit except for Dawn's mom. She was having trouble getting one of them lit, so Susan went over there to try and help her. But with the troublesome burner being the one beside the wall, the gas had unknowingly built up. So, when Susan used her own lighter to ignite the burner, all of the gas that had built up around them ignited too.

The explosion blew them both against the wall behind them and caused it to collapse on them. At the time we thought that them only being scorched and Susan still being conscious was due to the drug being in a container next to one of the burners. Now though I think that Dawn's mom had put a small telekinesis -excuse me -mover shield around them when the explosion happened to save them from the flames and later the falling wall and that the force of both together was what had caused her to fall unconscious instead of originally thinking it was a concussion from hitting the wall. Then, after we dug them out of the debris, Susan looked fine but Dawn's mom was still unconscious so we called the ambulance.

When they arrived and had checked Lisa out, I helped Linda load her onto the gurney and place her in the ambulance, but Susan, having also been injured, was sent with her to the hospital. Now, contrary to what she told you Stephan, she did not get fired. After the first accident the boss had bitched at her so much and been so hard on her that she felt like he would blame her for the accident this time as well and fire her. Then, after being informed of Lisa's death, she came back and told us she was tired of working so hard and getting involved in the accidents and was quitting. So the boss jumped at the chance of getting rid of someone he didn't like, made her sign a nondisclosure agreement, and gladly shipped her off. Then, when he found out about Lisa's death, he placed all of the blame on Susan and practically forbid us from ever even mentioning her name."

She then said in an aside to Stephan and Jessica, "But don't worry you two. We all knew that the explosion wasn't her fault alone. It was all of us in the lab's fault for coming up with the idea of using the Bunsen burners and then jumping at putting it in action."

Then, addressing the whole group, continued, "After hearing Holly's and Rachel's mothers experiences with Lisa, it looks like she almost died from using her ability too intensely. Then, when she got the shock treatment, it revived her energy enough for her to regain consciousness. When she did her ability allowed her to see Rachel starting to grow inside her mom. As she was seeing this she placed her hand on Linda's stomach, and said what she did. Plus she could actually feel Rachel's emotions and, in the process, she unknowingly used her ability to pass the feeler ability to Rachel as well. The intense use of her abilities then caused her to fall back unconscious.

Later at the hospital, I'm guessing she started to regain her energy because she contacted me telepathically and told me to look after Dawn and take care of her and that she would be home as soon as she could. This apparently taxed her energy levels again and required the use of the shock machine to restart her heart again. And, when it was used, it gave her enough energy to again wake up.

When she did, her ability allowed her to see Holly starting to grow. When she did, she was able to see Holly's emotions which were just starting up. Then, she apparently subconsciously used her ability to pass on the talent. But this time she apparently didn't realize that thinking of having done the same to Rachel, while also thinking about them finding someone to love and accept them, would basically set them up to almost automatically bond with each each other.

Most likely, this second use of her abilities then used up too much of her energy and she didn't know how to stop her abilities so it caused her whole system to shut down and it killed her.

Also, because of what Lisa said about you two, I think we should test both of yours abilities because when you add in the flying part that Lisa mentioned, I'm thinking that she may have also unknowingly passed on other abilities as well." Wanda finished.