Questions Answered

Joshua Raddison is having a rough go of it, a period of rotten luck that has now lasted a few days. Hours before his life was changed forever he was given a simple task; go and intimidate a little nerd who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something he wasn't supposed to.

The twenty-year-old has the stocky build of a football player, and is more than willing to grab weapons and use them to give himself another edge over the teens he is normally tasked with intimidating or roughing up. He goes to the nerd's school and, at first, his luck seems fantastic. He nabs the nerd while the student attends a talent show and is on his way back from the bathroom. The bully is able to sneak into the institution thanks to memories he has of his alma mater.

He roughs up the student and is in the middle of leaving a few bruises on him when he is suddenly and forcefully stopped mid-kick. He doesn't have enough time to initially process whatever is going on before he is suddenly and violently swung, by an invisible force, into a nearby wall, which immediately knocks him unconscious.

The next time he awakens he is stuck in a locker, though he doesn't know this, and can't move. This causes him to panic, but the initial panic he feels is small compared to what he feels when he realizes that he can't even scream! He can breathe, but other than that he could not call for help, or do anything of substance. This revelation haunts the man to his core, inflicting a level of terror that is so haunting that it etches itself onto his soul, provoking the birth of a new phobia.

For the next day and a half Joshua exists in an uncomfortable position, unable to even call out for help. During this time the only relief, and it was very short lived, he feels is when he discovers, to his almost immediate shame, that the mysterious force keeping him still isn't going to prevent him from expelling things that'd otherwise build up in him.

In time the figure begins to drift in and out of consciousness. The final time he regains consciousness before something of importance happens is actually just minutes before the locker is supernaturally opened.

The man feels a wave of relief wash over him when the locker opens. He excitedly tries to move but experiences a crushing wave of despair when he finds that he still cannot move. The despair intensifies abruptly when he begins to move but still cannot scream, and he realizes that he is being moved against his will. His head is turned and he finds himself facing a nearby door leading out of the building before being violently wrenched out of the locker.

"Hi there! We're going to have a very nice conversation, Joshua." Utters a gruff voice, from somewhere behind the hardened criminal. This voice penetrates Joshua's heart and fills it with a dark, intense fear. Joshua, despite being seen as nothing more than an effective gang banger, is not stupid. He knows when he is powerless. He recognizes his inability to resist the man who has decided to interact with him.

The man feels helpless, very truly and literally a prisoner in his own body, as he is psychically taken to the door he is pointed towards. When he reaches the door his body is pressed against the thing's bars to open the entrance into and exit out of the school. Joshua grimaces internally when he feels the cool metal of the door's bar pressing against his defeated, still bloody form as he is used to open the door, his captor able to be more gentle but not particularly feeling like it.

As Luciano humiliates the figure, aware of how dark this is but knowing that he's doing it to understand why various crimes have happened and willing to grapple with that, he uses his telekinesis on a nearby trash can and retrieves the cell phone he deposited in it sometime ago. The phone is pulled into the air some distance away from the telekinetic, who touches it with telekinesis and watches as it blinks to life. Notifications appear on the thing's lockscreen and Luciano reads them, though he can't see the complete content of various messages due to the fact that the thing is locked.

Luciano slowly carries Joshua, using his telekinesis with a level of ease that he doesn't show his fellow telekinetics, past a football field and into some woods outside of it. As he telekinetically carries the beaten, mentally exhausted figure, he begins to casually hum. He is enjoying this.

The jumper is learning from this, humming as he listens to the subtle creaks and groans of the man whose body he is using his powers on. It is an activity unlike any that he has done the entire time he's been jumping, as even at his most aggressive he has, at his very most proactively, merely stopped crimes from occurring and then left. This is something else entirely.

The jumper is holding someone captive with plans to interrogate them. He knows he won't need to be brutal, he knows that by setting things up this way he's already won, but he also knows that in the future, depending on the jumps he elects to visit these kinds of activities will be necessary. He is using this as a chance to practice skills he may need in the future, skills he plans to be good at for the day when he has to use them and can't so thoroughly control and dominate the circumstances by which he interrogates someone.

The two figures wander into the woods, and Luciano grins at the gangster he has captured. Once the two have wandered a fair deal away from the school the telekinetic releases most of his grip on the figure he's captured, causing the man to fall to his knees.

"You can move. Somewhat. And you, my friend, owe me some answers." Luciano remarks, still using his gruff sounding voice. He has adopted a new form, one that is distinctly different from his true form.

The telekinetic crime stopper currently looks like an older white man wearing ragged-looking clothes. Joshua attempts to turn and look at his attacker, but the effort fails when Luciano simply uses telekinesis to prevent him from doing so, not even glancing at him as he does this, and forcefully stopping the criminal from turning enough to be able to face the figure responsible for this grim abduction.

"Ah, you must think you're clever. The second you get your freedom you try to turn and look at me. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you right now that that's not clever, my friend." Luciano darkly says, before laughing quietly. The sound is incredibly intimidating given the circumstances by which Joshua came to be in Luciano's tender care.

"You owe me some answers and I'm a chatty sort so I thought it best that I extract those answers from you somewhat… unpleasantly. But how unpleasant, beyond the baseline we've established just by the circumstances that have led to us becoming acquaintances, is up to you. Now I'm going to ask you a question and you're going to answer it honestly." Luciano tells the man. Joshua says nothing, and waits for the question.

"Nothing to say in response? Good boy. What is your cellphone passcode?" Luciano asks. He is met with silence at first, and after a few seconds he sighs and with a grim look at his foe he forces Joshua's head to the ground and begin to put light pressure on his neck. He ratches up the pressure, slowly over a few seconds, until Joshua stammers out the digits that Luciano then inputs on the device he retrieved out of a trash can minutes ago.

The instant that Joshua confesses the code Luciano smiles and lightens the pressure he is putting on the criminal's neck, allowing the dirty figure to breathe more easily. When the code is entered it is accepted by the phone, and Luciano mentally files it away in case he needs it in the future.The powerful telekinetic begins to explore the phone, looking for anything he can take from it without ever actually touching the thing.

"Oh hey, Raddison you didn't lie! That's nice of you. That was smart." Luciano replies, smiling so broadly that traces of it feel audible. The powerful psychic purposefully reveals that he knows the man's last name, which sends a slight chill up Joshua's spine. The criminal is not completely hopeless, intellectually, so he already put together that it was very likely that his captor knew about his identity before asking him this question.

"Okay Joshua, I want to really hammer home the sort of situation you're in. You're tired, hungry, thirsty, and in pain. Someone is somehow able to puppet you against your will, move your body without your permission, and already knows your last name. It's… well it doesn't look good now does it?" Luciano asks, before forcefully using telekinesis to make Joshua nod. The adventurer chuckles darkly as he watches the display, really hamming up how powerful his abilities are and how willing he is to use them.

"Why were you at the school?" He asks, shortly before letting go, telekinetically speaking, of the man's neck and head. Joshua doesn't hesitate this time.

"I was given a job. I had to rough up a student, someone who saw something he shouldn't have." The criminal confesses, immediately violating America's national no-snitching policy in the wake of the alien power he is now grimly facing. Luciano listens to this and the look on his face becomes thoughtful as he listens to the revelation. When Joshua is done, Luciano nods and smiles appreciatively.

"Okay, well that's a start, my friend. Now who gave you the job? Who were you working for?" Luciano asks as he mentally files away the information that Joshua came to the school as part of some criminal assignment. Joshua also does not hesitate to divulge what he knows.

"It was a guy a friend of mine knows! His name is Matthew. He lives over in Shallow Heights." Joshua reveals, and Luciano inwardly notes that the criminal is loyal, first and foremost, to himself instead of to this "Matthew" person.

"Shallow Heights" is the name of the region that Andrew lives in, and Luciano inwardly sighs as he wonders how far this is going to go and what sort of actions will be required of him. Luciano's eyes flicker back to the cellphone and he navigates through various menus, until he finds a stream of messages from someone named "Matthew" that he begins to read even as he thinks about what next to ask.

"Do you know why you were tasked with the mission you were assigned?" Luciano asks, unsure of whether or not to expect an answer to this question. Joshua, however, does not disappoint the telekinetic pseudo-teen.

"Nathan saw something he wasn't supposed to. I was tasked with making sure he knows to stay silent." Joshua admits, which is intriguing and also very dumb. Luciano knows better than to think that gangsters are intelligent, but the baffling stupidity of this leaves him dumbstruck for a moment.

"So what if Nathan… isn't a coward?" Luciano asks, his voice lowering as he asks this question. Joshua falls silent, and then shrugs.

"In that case, someone else might be asked to intervene. And the results, normally, would be a bit worse than this." Joshua remarks, grimly. Luciano nods at this explanation, and begins to feel increasingly compelled to act.

"I see. In that case I suppose I have what I need from you." Luciano remarks, causing Joshua's heart to begin to race.

"Wait, what's going to happen to me?!? Joshua remarks, even as Luciano again seizes control of the man's body. Joshua stops moving, his body suddenly in Luciano's telekinetic vice-grip. Luciano tightly grips the man's throat, enough to keep him quiet, through skillful use of his particular brand of telekinetic power. At the same time Luciano finishes the text conversation between the two criminals, and mentally notes that as stupid as Matthew is he's not stupid enough to have texted Joshua about the crimes the bruiser has been asked to do.

Luciano's speciality as far as telekinetic things go appears to be control. He is capable of deft skill with telekinetically manipulating multiple objects at the same time, so much so that he can even clamp down on mobile objects or living beings. It is his focus on control that allows him to render the energy he uses to manipulate things inert enough that he can infuse it into himself and freely empower his physical actions.

Luciano lightly taps the phone four times, three of which are to enter numbers, and the fourth of which is to initiate a phone call. The phone rings briefly before someone picks up.

"Hello this is 9-1-1, what is your emergency?" A voice asks on the other end of the call. In the silence of the woods the phone call is loud enough that Joshua can hear the voice. Joshua's eyes widen as he begins to more fully dread whatever is about to happen next. Luciano uses telekinesis to manipulate Joshua's limbs and then begins to punch himself in the face.

"I need the police! I'm in the woods between North High and the old country roads. Someone is… attacking somebody!" Luciano loudly exclaims, as he moves the phone closer to Joshua, who continues to be telekinetically manipulated to punch himself. The speaker on the other end of the call is about to say more, but Luciano deliberately hangs up the phone before she can. Luciano then immediately smiles and completely paralyzes the man, still totally unaware of Luciano's appearance, even in his disguised form.

The telekinetic glances up at the tallest of the nearest trees, and opts to take advantage of the dark. He silently begins to fly up into the canopy of the tree, and begins to wait. It takes a few minutes before a cop car arrives nearby, and when they do the superpowered nerd smirks darkly.

One facet of Luciano that is wholly his own, not something awarded to him by a perk or a part of an origin, is his on-the-spot creativity. In his past life, he was a writer and he long daydreamed about what he'd do if he had superpowers of his own. Telekinesis was one of his favorite superpowers in his first life, and in the time since he acquired it himself he has honed it into a strikingly effective, and at times terrifying power. He is thinking of ways to use it in even more terrifying ways than he has already used it, eager to experiment with this power and learn what are the limits of what he can do.

The flashing lights of the nearby cop car begin to cut through the gloom of the early morning darkness enveloping the woods. Luciano silently watches from atop the tallest trees, his stealthy presence nearly undetectable as a single cop exits her vehicle and looks into the densely wooded area, looking for someone, or something in it to approach and investigate. Luciano silently intervenes, by making Joshua get up and begin to awkwardly shuffle towards her.

Internally Joshua begins to freak out as he feels his body being puppeted against his will, and in his desperation, he even begins to pray, to internally cry out for divine intervention. He tries to scream as he robotically shuffles towards the cop but the sound is strangled when Luciano, flying between branches to keep an eye on the criminal he's hunted down, uses telekinesis to lightly pinch Joshua's throat, keeping the sound from escaping.

The captured criminal reeks and the first thing that alerts the cop out of her vehicle that something is off is when she is suddenly olfactorily assaulted and smells something truly horrendous. She winces and cringes, rearing back from the woods right as a flash of light illuminates the criminal whose face is partially covered in long-dried blood who is being forced to approach her by an eerie foe capable of forcibly paralyzing his enemies and depriving them of their bodily autonomy.

Joshua, still puppeted by his true captor, seems to awkwardly lunge at the cop, who cries out as the seemingly deranged criminal speedily closes the distance between the two. This causes the woman's partner to dart out of their vehicle and brandish a stun gun. He immediately fires the thing, even as the female cop punches the face of the figure she believes to be assaulting her, even though he is actually nothing more than a prop in a play she does not know she is an actor in.

Luciano faintly feels the impact of the woman's fist as it hammers Joshua's face, a hilariously dull echo of it, and he grins as he releases his grip on Joshua. The criminal is hit by the projectiles violently expelled from the stun gun moments ago, and begins to violently tremble as he falls back, weakened by the circumstances of his capture, followed immediately by days of undue stress placed on his body by what he endured during his captivity, all of which is exacerbated by the damage he has just endured.

Joshua immediately passes out as he twitches due to the combined damages of the punch to the face and the stun gun. Luciano darkly grins and turns and flies away from the scene. He uses the woods to fly part of the way home and then walks the rest of the way, only to take a quick shower, learns that school is cancelled for the day as authorities investigate an odd occurrence that occurred near the school earlier today and see if it has any connection to blood found in a hallway as well as a foul smell that emanates from the same part of the school.

Luciano is excited to text his friends as he readies himself to follow up on what is going in Shallow Heights. He gets dressed, morphs into a new form, and uses his phone to arrange for a taxi to come and transport him to an area close to Andrew's neighborhood, so he can follow up on what he learned from Joshua.