Awakening, Pt 3

You sweep outward with your Telepathy and your Third Eye in an attempt to find the Conductor of this dissonant orchestra. If you can find who and where this person is and disrupt their hold, then this attack would almost certainly fall apart.

Or at least, make it easier for the Watch to dismantle it.

But as you do so, you find your senses dulled the further out you reach. The psionic world around you becomes muffled and foggy, which makes pinpointing any other presences practically impossible.

You realize that the Conductor, whoever they are, is emitting a large amount of low-level psionic energy. It acts like radio or tv static, and blurs the lines of energy that weave through everything. Not only that, but this disruptive field is amplified by the chaotic energies of the Crazed Telekinetics running all over the place.

It's almost as though you're all fighting in a thick, soupy psionic mess.

Since you can't directly target whoever is controlling this fight, a part of you wants to pulse out a massive Surge to root them out. But you know that would most certainly affect the members of the Watch, and you're not sure if it would affect any of the Crazed in front of you.

Their chaotic psi armor is simply too robust to break through, not with a power so simple.

And since most members of the Watch barely have psionic powers, they would easily get hindered by your Surge more than anything else out there. Basically, all you'd do is cause more problems than solve them. That's the last thing that needs to happen right now.

As you search for your enemy, and as you ruminate on what to do about them, the Crazed Telekinetics continue their harried assault. They run and flit and leap with preternatural speed and precision as they assault members of the Watch.

A Crazed runs in from the flank and swats one of the Watch with a frenzied swing of their fist. It's strong enough to throw the defender off to the side out of cover, but not so powerful as to outright kill him. Although his armor easily absorbs much of the damage, the breath is still knocked out of his lungs.

One of the Watch defending their section of the barricade swiftly turns his rifle to the Crazed and fires a burst, but finds his target to be way too fast. It leaps away at the right time, and his bullets hit nothing but concrete and air. The Crazed then scrambles away into cover and out of sight.

As it runs off, the two Watch defenders pull themselves together then fall back to a more secure position behind them.

Most of the front line is assaulted just like this - the Crazed harass the Watch one by one, and whittle away at their defenses bit by bit. As they do so, the line pulls back slowly but surely. Simply, the Watch aren't fast enough to deal with the psionic forces in front of them. They need more psions in their ranks, without a doubt.

For the moment, you're all they've got.

Pressed for time, you push yourself to try something else. If you can't find the Conductor, then at the very least you could study it, and the powers it's using. You could analyze how they use their psionic energy to control the Crazed Telekinetics, and perhaps even turn it against them.

First you focus on their use of the Discipline of Connection - maybe if you can figure out how they're linked to each other, you could potentially sever or disrupt or manipulate it. But you quickly find that what the Conductor is doing is beyond your knowledge.

They're not using Telepathy, at least not in the same way you do. And most likely, whatever power is in use is one or two steps above Telepathy.

You grimace at the realization - if you don't know how that energy is shaped, then you certainly can't do anything to sever it. Throwing pure Telepathic energies into the streams could empower them rather than diminish…

As a result, you attempt to focus in further on those psionic energies, to try and figure out exactly how they're formed. The more you study it, the clearer it becomes that it's still transmitting information. It's like a Surge, but directed to specific individuals. And they're protected, much like a heavily muted Telepathic stream.

No, not just protected - scrambled perhaps. Or encrypted.

You determine that it's behaving similar to a computer Network, so you name it exactly that. The Conductor is using a psionic Network to issue… what exactly? Commands? Advice? Psionic energy? Actual musical notes? You have no idea.

The more you study their use of psionic energies, you come to realize that they aren't just channeling Connection. You also sense energies of Cognition laced within. The implication sends a shiver down your spine.

You've long since become aware that you're far more perceptive than usual. Certainly before the world descended down into this. You've been able to hear things most can't. You can see further than before. You can taste and touch and smell with a greater degree than ever, and everything's more evident to you.

Every physical sense you have is more highly attuned, and improving even more as the days pass. ESP, in the classic sense. Your senses are enhanced in every sense of the word.

You honestly believe that's the reason for your massive headaches - you've simply become more sensitive to everything, including pain. And just like your powers in Connection, you need to spend more time fine-tuning them. Doing so will only make you more powerful in the end. And also, hopefully, have less headaches to deal with.

A spike of pain shooting across your head tells you that you're on the right track.

Regardless, it dawns on you that these Crazed Telekinetics are being imbued with a low level of ESP. Not quite as intense as yours, but more than enough to make them more dangerous. It gives them the ability to react to the Watch with incredible speed and skill. And combined with their natural talents for Control, it makes them a truly powerful opponent.

But what's most astonishing to you is that the Conductor is clearly combining the energies of two separate Disciplines! By interweaving Connection and Cognition, specifically of Network and ESP, it creates a different kind of psionic energy.

Until now, that's not something you realized could be possible, and it dawns on you that your ideas about your abilities are far from comprehensive or complete.

But there's no time to rethink yourself quite yet - you have to act!

So you take a page from whoever's out there and attempt to combine your own psionic energies together.

After deconstructing the Conductor's Network, you're able to build your own, using your Surge and Telepathy as a base. You reach outward yet again using a directed, shaped Telepathic Burst, specifically towards the individuals of the Watch.

It's tough at first, and the effort comes with a sharp increase in pain, but you're able to successfully link yourself to them. The paths themselves seem shaky and almost fragile. Your mind feels slightly fragmented with each connection, as though portions of yourself have to focus on each individual link. If you don't, you feel they would all fall apart and shatter with ease.

Since the majority of the Watch aren't Telepaths, all you can do is affect them subtly and subconsciously. It's a bit like you tug at them and pull them in certain directions, as opposed to physically moving them or giving them direct orders.

But it's more than that - Networks move in both directions after all. As you imbibe the Watch with your Telepathic energies, their surface thoughts and emotions come to you in response. You feel their anxieties and fears flowing everywhere, and not just through you. They echo down the Network itself, and intensify as a whole.

Alarmed by the psionic feedback, you do your best to soften their dread, to prevent it from overflowing the Network itself. As you try it, you find that you're hardly able to tamp them down with any meaningful effort - you're also filled with fear and worry, especially against an opponent you can't even see.

You quickly compensate by tapping into your Discipline of Control, specifically your Temperance. Using those psionic energies, you force your body to calm down. First you regulate your own breathing, and purposefully slow down your heart rate. Then, you infuse your body with raw psionic energies - just enough to feel more confident and capable. More than that, you steel yourself, as though you're preparing to take a punch.

By doing so, you infuse those same energies into everyone within your Network.

The psionic energies of Control flow down Telepathic pathways and fill each of the Watch with powers similar to your own. It's a bit like you're lending each of them a part of you, a portion of your skills and powers.

Although you're nowhere near as proficient with your Temperance, it's more than enough to give the Watch a major physical boost. All of them begin to calm down and focus harder at the battle in front of them. Not only that, but they also become slightly tougher and stronger as well.

And thanks to that psionic feedback that's naturally present in the Network, their capabilities swirl and mix and swell more and more as time passes. Yours does as well, though not as effectively as the others. As you maintain the dozen or so connections, the pounding in your head intensifies, and your eyesight begins to waver and lose focus.

Despite the pain, you grin widely, and with pride.

It's the first time you've attempted anything like this, and it's working beautifully. Not only do the effects increase with time, but every individual link within the Network strengthens as well. You can see them intensify and grow as every second passes, though they ultimately taper off after a while, indicative of your own psionic limits.

Still, you're excited by the prospect of not only gaining a new power and ability, but of being able to share it in this way. That same excitement ripples through the Network as well, which contributes to the empowerment that the Watch experiences.

You steady yourself on seeing your energies propagate - your every thought and emotion makes or breaks the Network. As a result, you can't be reckless with your state of mind.

Then, with a burst of inspiration, you channel your Cognition energies into your Network. At first, you do what the Conductor is doing and inject some measure of your ESP into the Watch. Their senses quickly increase and heighten even as your own does as well.

As a result, they're able to almost go toe-to-toe against the Crazed Telepaths. You see them react to their attacks with such celerity and certainty that the front line stops backing up. They stop regrouping or retreating, and instead evade and reposition with increasing determination.

You know for a fact that if you give your Network a bit of time, the Watch will outperform and outmaneuver the Crazed Telepaths. In fact, one or two of them have become fast enough to fire their weapons more accurately.

They turn their weapons downrange and fire numerous bursts at where they think the Crazed will be, and end up clipping them with one or two rounds. More than enough to slow the wounded Crazed for a moment - enough for a second burst to tear through their chests.

But you decide to go further.

You can tell that your own burgeoning powers of Foresight have been increasing since that first fateful day. Although you're only able to glimpse a few fleeting seconds ahead of your current self, they come much more readily than before.

And in those slivers of time, it feels as though you're in a kind of trance-like echo where your consciousness exists at two points across existence. In those moments, it seems like you're stretched out over time, where you can see your past and your future at the same time. The experience is somewhat unnerving, even if brief

But now you need that ability - if you can imbue it into the Watch for this fight, then all of you could turn it in a heartbeat.

Your Foresight echoes across the network and gets woven into every member of the Watch around you. The psionic energies slip into their psyches and fills their mind's eye. It's jarring at first, seeing time fragmented and stretched in this way.

Thanks to the dire circumstances, and to the Network, everyone does their best to get used to the temporal dissonance. It's only seconds later that they begin to understand how to use those random slivers of time.

Though you're all far from experts, seeing them causes all of you to better judge when to attack, or evade, or rally, or retreat.

Fused with all three Psionic Disciplines, everyone in the Watch becomes like a super soldier - you can briefly see the future, can shrug off attacks, and can move and act as one. That realization sweeps through all your minds at the same time, as though you've all been awakened to some greater power, some higher calling.

All of you feel this attunement grow in your hearts and minds, as it pulses rhythmically like a war drum. That strength and power courses through all of you, with the psionic feedback causing a kind of harmonic note to echo all through your minds.

Emboldened by your Battle Hymn, all of you collectively decide to end the threat of these Crazed once and for all.