A Jaded Life

Idiots… While I was certain that there were many other, yes similar or synonymous, words to describe these people adequately, idiots would have to do for now. Morons, mentally challenged or the fairly old-fashioned retarded could also be used but two of those were something I didn’t want to use due to their other connotations. Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what word or words were used in the description, as long as their terminal, almost suicidal, lack of planning, prudence and general caution was represented to its full extent. Not that I thought putting that much idiocy into words was actually possible without a fairly long rant but one could try and I had a feeling I actually would try when telling the others what our visitors had been planning. Damn idiots.

It turned out, their plan hadn’t been a bad one, as one can’t ascribe quality to something nonexistent. It would be akin to telling somebody that the cookies they didn’t make had tasted bad, they hadn’t, nor had they tasted good, they never existed in the first place. As was the case with their plan, they had moved into the mysterious tower, recognised me as a person without even considering the, by now, fairly obvious non-human features of my body and decided that a lone female without any obvious weapons couldn’t be a threat. Granted, I now realised that I had reflexively blocked the use of Observe without even noticing I had done so and I might have been overcompensating a little in regards to the concealment and control of my Aura so close to crossing the second divide, masking my power even further than I normally did but that didn’t change the fact that these people had no plan whatsoever. No plan, no real idea what they were going to do, just some instinct-driven aggression and a vague notion of making me like ‘it’ so they could do what they wanted afterwards.

On the bright side, their lack of a plan meant that there was no backup for it either, or in other words, now that they were caught, they lacked direction. There’d be no coordinated effort to escape, nor did I get the impression that they were concealing some sort of trump card that might allow them to escape, either together or one of them on his own. Sure, I would still remain cautious and make sure that there was no such thing, even if my impression was wrong, but their lack of planning and prudence meant I had a lot less problems to consider than I feared. Nobody knew where these people had gone to, other than into the city, looking for supplies, so I didn’t have to worry about their buddies back home, not that their description of their community sounded like a group I wanted to have anything to do with.

From what I could tell, their group was somewhat similar to a gang or a band of thieves and robbers, held together by a somewhat powerful leader who gave them a modicum of protection and direction, but nothing I would consider troublesome. If the information they had given me was correct, something I considered likely due to its consistency across five separate interrogations, their group would break up before long, likely when the supplies they stole started to run out. How long that would take was hard to guess, there were a couple of inconsistencies in their statements which I chalked up to a mix of guesswork on their part and possible attempts to make themself appear sympathetic to me, but I doubted it would take more than a month or two. If they were lucky, some of them would be accepted into other groups, or maybe they’d manage to find some warehouse filled with nonperishable food to stretch their supplies far enough but at the end of the day, their group was doomed unless they started to farm. Because that was a condition shared across all groups, unless they managed to get a sustainable source of food going, something Luna was constantly experimenting with and working on, the group had no future. No matter how many storehouses one managed to find, no matter how many supplies one managed to hoard, they would run out eventually. It was just a question of time.

But maybe ignoring that inevitably was just another part of the human condition, after all, we had collectively built a massive part of our civilisation on limited resources, oil being a prime example, and ignored that it would run out, no matter how many new tricks we came up with to drill or frack for more, it would run out. Inevitably.

Or, as it had turned out, the apocalypse could come from an entirely different direction, one nobody had expected, but I wasn’t certain I would call that a benefit, not with billions of dead and humanity a broken shadow of its former self, inhabiting a world far from the one we had been born into. But that was an entirely different topic for another day.

For now, I decided that I had learned as much as I could hope with the benign interrogations, so it was time to see if I could get something else with a bit of magical enhancement. Simply reading through their minds and picking up every scheme and thought they ever had was still far out, though I had made some efforts to get into their heads. Those efforts had been rewarded with two points in the skill, pushing it to a fairly impressive seventy-four, making me wonder if I was almost there. Or maybe I was already at the point where I could read minds, the problem was simply that I couldn’t interpret the data just yet, which might be a problem of experience, not of skill.

If nothing else, I was fairly confident that the ability to pull somebody into a mindscape I controlled would be the ultimate tool to torture somebody. Controlling their every sense allowed for perfect sensory deprivation, I might even be able to alter the perceived flow of time, allowing me to disorientate them even further. Plus, pain was just another stimulus, usually used by the body to tell the mind something was wrong but there was no reason why I wouldn’t be able to induce that stimulus without needing to damage the body. But those were experiments I would only begin once the test subjects were no longer of any other use, for now, experimenting with subtle mind reading was the order of the day.

Thus, I decided to continue my experiments, using my captives as, well, captive audience and bored into their minds, not trying to push the power up but working subtly. Curiously, there was a sweet spot between the power needed to get into their heads and the point where the power was too much, rapidly giving them a headache serious enough to make me stop as I didn’t want my test subjects to expire, especially not while I was within their minds. Maybe I would try to get some second-hand experience of death at some point if only to help me further my understanding of Death Magic, but that was an entirely different experiment. For now, having my captives bleed from their nose or eyes was a bad thing and to be avoided, or at least the experiments stopped once I got to that point.

Still, with each attempt, I was getting a little better, the streaming colours were no longer an utterly confusing mess but something I was finding patterns in. Following those patterns, allowed me to start decoding their thoughts into something I could understand, though trying to combine words, flashing images and a multitude of other sensations into a coherent picture was a challenge. One I relished, at least until I started to get a headache of my own and decided to pack things up for the day, somewhat fascinated by the information I had managed to get. Not because the information was worth anything, most of what I had seen hadn’t been recent or relevant, but because of the strange details these people had been focused on in their memories, making me wonder just how the human mind worked.

Maybe I was now at the point where I dared try to experiment somewhat intrusively with my dear daughters, allowing me to work with a test subject who would willingly bring up distinct memories repeatedly and even tell me what I was actually looking at, further helping me to decode the bubbling mess I had seen in these minds.

At least with the experience I had now accumulated I was fairly confident I wouldn’t burn out one of their brains on accident, if anything, I considered it more likely that I would hurt myself trying but, somehow, I was okay with that option. Or maybe not okay but I considered getting a headache myself the better possibility compared to giving one of my daughters a headache. Curious how that worked.

Shaking my head, I made sure that all the security measures I had woven into the area holding the cells were active, the cells themself sealed, though no longer in complete darkness in repayment of their cooperation with my interrogation, and the prisoners all accounted for. Now, I could start working with Daniel on his magical education, using, amusingly, some of the same tricks I was using on the prisoners.