At least the jog to school afterwards refreshes you a little. It's not far enough to get you all sweaty, just far enough for the cold air to slap you awake some.
You have your Chemistry work in your bag as you head to to your locker, where Madison is, as usual, waiting for you. There's a faint flush to her cheeks when you call cheerfully out to her, but she greets you happily enough, and doesn't shrink back out of embarassment like you'd been half-afraid she would. Indeed, she doesn't even hesitate to step into a quick hug, although you're self-consciously forced to end it early so that you don't risk drawing any undue attention.
"Hi," you say with a small smile.
She looks up at you happily, a larger smile adorning her face. "Hi," she says cheerily. "Did you sleep well after I left?"
You shrug, dropping your voice. "Not as well as I did while you were over, but well enough," you reply. "How about you?"
Instead of responding, she leers at you a little bit half-hopefully. "I slept really good," she says in what you think is her attempt at a seductive purr. It's more cute than seductive, but you're willing to play along. "I was nice and tired by the time I fell asleep, hehe." Her voice may not have sounded very seductive, but you'll be damned if the perverted little chuckle she lets out at the end of her sentence doesn't do some interesting things to you— as does the red that steals up her cheeks when her words catch up with her.
You just raise your eyebrows at her, though, conscious of the potential audience around you. "Well, I'm glad to hear it," you say mildly. She flushes harder, looking very hard down at the floor. "We should probably get to class, though."
"Yeah," she mumbles, looking up and giving you an embarassed grin. You give her a reassuring grin of your own, and hers becomes softer somehow, more happy than embarassed.
It's hard to focus in class with Madison right beside you, not that you mind very much. You spend most of your time holding her hand beneath the desk while you lean over, trying to explain the lessons to her while you resist the urge to feel her up beneath the desk. It's really— it's actually quite distracting. You're constantly aware of her now, of how warm she feels, of her soft her skin is. All you want to do is take her hand and lead her away, but you can't, you're in the middle of class.
The bell thankfully— disappointingly— rings around the point your thoughts begin swinging in that direction. You're distracted enough that most of the class packs up and begins moving out before you've even finished packing up.
This is driving you insane. Not in a bad way, but you can't— you have to keep yourself distracted. But how? You've already done your homework, and even your Chemistry work has been finished. You could work on an extracurricular project, but...
Well, there is one thing you've been putting off.
Honestly, you've been trying to avoid using your power on random people at school. It makes you feel... obliged, kind of. When you use your powers on someone, you're learning how they feel. That's knowing someone on a pretty intimate level, and you've never been able to turn yourself away from someone you've come to know.
There's a reason you're still so hung up over Emma. You're self-aware enough to know that.
You make your way into the halls and settle down in your second class, letting out a long exhale. It might make you feel obliged, but, well, you've been planning on doing something about Rune for a while now. What does it really matter if you make that goal feel a little more urgent? (It matters a lot. You just can't turn away from the thought now you've acknowledged it.)
And really, you do need to figure out the limits to your power. Not just so you know what your limits are, but because it would be really bad if you ever thought you could do something when you needed to, but you couldn't.
You grimace and pull your notebook out. You have experimented with your powers a bit before, and learned some things. That'd be a good place to start, right?
When you'd first obtained your powers, you'd spent some time experimenting with them. You feel a little bit bad about that now, but there's... there's a heady rush when you use your power.
Some people might try and judge you for what you'd done, but until they've gone through what you'd gone through— until they've felt that helpless, that exposed, that useless— they don't have the right to judge you. They can't judge you until they've felt like that, until they've found themselves searching for some way, any way to make themselves feel not completely worthless-
— you shake your head for the second time that day. Going back down that path won't help anyone.
When you'd first obtained your powers, you'd spent some time experimenting with them. You'd quickly learned a few things.
The best way you've been able to conceptualize your power is by describing it as feeling and 'pulling' on someone's emotions, but that doesn't quite capture it. People's emotions are very complex creatures, and it's not easy to affect them.
Emotions aren't like a chart, where you can look and see that a given person is currently feeling a lot of anger and a smaller amount of restraint. Emotions are more like... a fine dish (and isn't that just an uncomfortable analogy). You can take a brief glimpse and see that they're feeling a lot of anger and restraint, but other emotions are threaded subtly through them, and it takes time to sort through them. Even then, just like in a meal, you're not always able to tell what's actually in their heads. You can just get a vague impression of what it's like. You can feel that an emotion is somehow related to anger, the same way that you can tell a given herb is spicy. That doesn't tell you what the emotion is— all you can do is make your best guess.
You close your eyes, focusing on your power, and extend it around you.
Some emotions are more readily accessible than others. You can feel the lust of the women around you, for instance— it's a warm, thrumming feeling, contentment and excitement shot through with spikes of arousal. That's really the best way you can conceptualize it.
It's harder for you to "feel out" other emotions. When you try to grab the anger of the boy in front of you, it... resists you, for lack of a better word. The "mental grip" of your power squeezes around their anger, but every time you try to pull on it, it— it doesn't pull back, not really, but it becomes more real, or maybe the mental grip of your power becomes less real. Either way, the result is the same; you're only able to make minor adjustments before your "mental grip" snaps back, and you have to quickly shove your hand in your mouth to stifle the groan of pain you'd otherwise let echo across the classroom.
Right, well. Mental note to self (and one day, you should really start trying to remember these): don't try and pull on emotions you can't get a good grip on. It doesn't end well.
It's hard to tell, at least without doing some experimentation you're pretty sure you're literally never going to want to do, but you think that that particular effect is caused because you're not feeling particularly angry at the moment. The more you're feeling something, the easier it is to feel that emotion in other people, and the less resistance their emotions offer you.
That's just a theory, though. You're not going to go and deliberately make yourself feel depressed so that you can test whether it's easier to make other people feel depressed while you do. It would just explain a lot of things, like why you're functionally unable to feel out lust in men, and why you've never really been able to make other people feel cheerful.
The bell rings suddenly, jarring you out of your thoughts. You look blearily around at the other students, some of whom are giving you odd looks. You— huh.
Has it really been almost an hour already? Wow. It's really easy to lose track of time while you're experimenting with your powers.
You try and keep a better track of the time as you walk to your next class and sit down.
You've experimented a lot with your emotional manipulation powers before, but that's not the only aspect to your power. You can manipulate other people, yeah, but you can also feel them out. And— well.
Honestly, you're pretty sure that you're never, ever going to tell anyone about your emotional manipulation power. You can't even imagine telling Madison, and you're pretty sure that she would take that secret to the grave. The implicit admission that you're able to manipulate their emotions... Who could trust you after that? Even though you might never intend to use it on them again, that thought would always lurk in their minds. It'd destroy the foundations of their trust in you. Perhaps deservedly, but even so.
But if you're going to do something about Rune, you're going to need help. Your powers aren't very useful in combat, and if you try to get in a fight with the girl, she'll probably kick your ass. You're not going to be able to do it alone, and that means asking for help— and that means admitting that you have powers yourself, if you're going to get anyone to actually listen to you.
And if you're going to tell someone that you have powers, you'd rather admit that you can feel someone's emotions than that you can manipulate them.
You're pretty sure that you spend most of the rest of the day wandering around in a daze as you focus on your powers. You know that you do cut your powers off at one point during lunch, as you wander around the school looking for a safe place where you might be able to pull Emma aside, but— no such luck. It seems like everywhere you go, people are milling around.
You don't let up, though. Bouncing between a few uses of your power, you're able to determine the following things:
First, your power doesn't really have a "range", as far as you're able to tell. Rather, it just becomes increasingly difficult for you to stretch your power out as you move away from yourself. It's... similar to mental strain, the kind you feel when you accidentally overwork yourself. You're able to stretch it all over the school without issue, and you don't even feel unduly strained when you try to push it across the road from the school, but the further you go, the worse off you feel. You end up stop trying before you manage to make it to the nearest store, a bit over half a mile away. You could probably make it that far, but you're pretty sure the headache you'd get from it would put you out of commission within minutes.
Second, you're not restricted to sensing people you're able to see, but it does get harder when you don't know where they are. Or, more correctly, when you know where someone is, they feel... sharper, somehow. Like with sight. When you know where someone is, you're able to 'visualize' someone better. Otherwise, it's like you're seeing them through your peripheral vision. You know they're there, and you have a general impression of what is, but you can't really make out details without being able to 'see' them.
It's odd, but maybe you're becoming more used to feeling out Madison and Sophia, because even when you don't know where they are, you're able to feel them much... much better than you can the people around them, for lack of a better way to put it.
And honestly, if nothing else, the realization that you can feel Madison and Sophia at school even when they're not next to you— that's worth it all on its own.
Third; you realize this was a terrible idea.
Or, well. It was actually a fantastic idea, but using your power actively like this does have a downside that makes itself known well before you even manage to head to the library to tutor Madison: the enormous and painful headaches that come with using it.
You already knew about it, of course, but you didn't really understand what triggers it before now. Now you do, or you think you do, although you wish you'd managed to figure it out in a rather less painful way.
You're fairly certain that it's a combination of the complexity of the emotions you're trying to sense, the number of people you're trying to track, and the distance that the person is for you.
It feels... honestly, you could barely feel any strain while you were feeling the emotions of the guy sitting in front of you at class. Mostly, he was feeling boredom and irritation, both relatively simple emotions. You could keep that up for, probably, a few hours before the pain gets bad enough to make you stop.
On the other hand, you'd felt the strain developing quickly when you'd tried to feel the emotions of your entire class. It hadn't been so quick that you'd immediately stopped, but you doubt you could keep that kind of effort up for more than an hour or so. And when you'd tried to stretch yourself out further than that— well, you'd stopped as soon as you'd tried to feel out the next class, too. The combination of the physical distance and the added numbers, it'd added up fast.
It's not simple enough that you can try and assign numbers to it, or anything. But as a general rule, you're pretty sure that your power works best when you're not trying to do anything too complex with it, when you're not trying to sense too many people at a time, and when you're not trying to sense what people are feeling half a city away.
At least, that's what you've been able to figure out so far. You might be drawing erronous conclusions, or missing something. But until you're able to test this much more extensively, these are the assumptions you're going to have to work under.
[Tuesday Planning]
The rest of the week is going to be fairly important, you know that. You're not even close to being able to actually approach doing anything about Rune and her influence at school— hell, your headache is still throbbing away, and you've already determined that you're not going to touch your power until the weekend. But— you can't help but remember what it felt like to extend your power over everyone at school. It didn't feel miserable, not exactly, but it did feel... hopeless. Like nobody here really expects to get out.
You can't do anything big now. You're still an unknown face at Winslow, and most of the people who do know your face, you wish they didn't. You can't even dedicate all your time to doing things to help them; even as you consider the thought, your stomach twists unpleasantly, and you shake your head instinctively. No, your girls are going to be your priority, that's a given.
But... you do need to start. And that's going to start today.
So, what exactly are you going to do for the rest of the week? [Pick up to three.]
