“And finally,” Zane concluded, tension high in the air as his hair and added product battled the humidity of the air while he stood at the podium, “there is the myth of the RainStorm System.”

The audience in the dim auditorium—an odd-looking bunch of about seven hundred or so, some wearing helmets of aluminum foil and others wearing glasses that made the size of their eyes rival those of bugs while others simply wore smug smirks and pointed their noses skywards—grasped the edges of their seats and strained their entire beings to get closer to the stage while not standing up.

On stage, Zane struggled to keep his empathic shield up against the waves of anticipation for his final concept—the one that had been advertised most on the agenda of his seminar at Bellevue’s Civic Center: Castillo-Maleficent Challenges the RainStorm System.” He had to keep his presentation up. He could not just give into the torrents of audience-generated eagerness. He mentally called upon his reserve of energy to dilute and divert the streams of energy coming his way.

“The RainStorm System,” he said, annunciating every syllable, telepathically searching the crowd’s numerous minds for challengers to his challenge, “is not as effective as it claims to be. In fact, I go so far as to say it is a form of convert mind-over-matter on their part in order to make its clients and users believe they are gaining psionic abilities when, in fact, they are doing nothing they could not do before.”

“I will not say it is not effective—no matter how miniscule its level of effect—but I will say as I’ve said before that it is not as effective as it claims to be. I have purchased and run multiple tests on the system only to find that the components are about as effective as those of you who are thinking that wearing aluminum-foil helmets can block your thoughts from me or those wearing psi-enhancing specs will link your thoughts to my own.”

Chatter instantly flared up among the audience and pretty soon Zane had to enlist the help of security to calm the crowd, as a few man fanned out around the audience working for RainStorm (who Zane had successfully located telepathically during his speech) attempted to rile the rest of the viewers into a mob.

“And to this, I say: RainStorm should be no more, and they should refund the money of each and every customer they served mediocre products to.”

The audience went wild again, and this time Zane made no attempt to quiet them down.

(Ω)

After speaking to a few interested audience members, Zane was escorted to his limo and driven to the Bellevue Orion Condominium where he was taken to the penthouse. As he walked in, he saw the twins Yordin and Xaydin laying on their backs on the bed and playing videogames upside down.

“How’d it go?” asked Xaydin, his tight curly hair pressed down to his head as if unaffected by the shift in gravity upon them. “Was that stalker with the camera there?”

“I told you before,” Zane said, pulling off his suit jacket and button-down pale green shirt, “he’s not a stalker. He’s an underpaid photographer for the Gastan Newspaper.”

“Then why did he come all the way from Gastan to take pictures of you?” asked Yordin, wavy curls moving with every syllable as if connected directly to his vocal chords.

“Gastan is not a place; it’s the name of the late hero of the city. He lives in Soboro City,” Zane explained as he kicked his shoes off over his brothers’ backs and onto the floor.

“Do you think the stalker knows that Zane knows so much about him, Yordin?” asked Xaydin.

“Well if he did, then he would know that he’s a sucky stalker because his target knows more about him and his life than the way it’s supposed to be, Xaydin,” answered Yordin.

“Do you think they should just get married and get it over with?” Xaydin asked, narrowly dodging the shirt Zane threw his way.

“No,” Yordin said, “Stalker-boy is soo mine.”

“Gross,” Xaydin shoved his twin with his leg and continued playing the multiplayer game on the consol.

Zane shook his head and took the white Condo-provided bathrobe, wrapping it around him and pulling his underwear off. He let it stay right where it fell. He then closed his eyes and heard the boys pause the game, feeling their glances on his robed person.

After thirty seconds, he opened his eyes and saw that he’d folded his clothes properly this time with psychokinesis, for they floated before him as proof. His brothers, as usual, had attempted to use their low-level versions of psychokinesis to mess up his efforts, but he’d brushed them off without even trying. They both were out of breath at the end and had only managed to put a slight wrinkle in the shirt when he’d stopped doing anything.

“Maybe next time, kids,” he said, admiring how they never even thought about giving up but only got stronger (even if only by a fraction) with every attempt to sabotage his efforts. He realized that he would have to start teaching them how to use their abilities—and that he should have been doing so before; but how could he when the most they could do on a good day was slow down the flapping of a mosquito’s wings? And even that required their combined efforts.

At the request of his mother, Zane had taken the twins with him to Bellevue so that they could be motivated to get into psionics. It was apparent that they did not give a damn about it at all. With the exception of their advanced twin telepathy, which even Zane found it hard to mentally hack into the link, they were as non-psionic as 98.5 of the people on Earth. (Zane made up 1 of the people that were).

Zane plucked the clothes from the air and walked to the kitchen, where dinner had been left warm on the stove. He set his clothes into the laundry chute and then fixed himself some dinner—baked chicken which he cut into the salad while he peeled and added tangerine slices.

Zane sighed and remembered how his mother never accepted that the twins just did not want to learn the art. He shook his head. There was nothing wrong with being non-psionic; there was nothing worse about being non-psionic. She should have been happy that they even did the little bit they chose to do.

It was about nine o’ clock when Zane had washed up after his dinner. He truly wanted to go to sleep, but had remembered about the steam room being most empty on Wednesday nights because of the shows the condos hosted in the common center.

“Xay, Yor,” Zane called as he rolled a white towel in his arms and was about to leave. “I’m going to the steam room. You guys can come or you can stay and go to bed at ten.”

“I’ll go,” Xaydin said, rolling off the bed and stripping as he ran through the open space to grab a robe and towel.

“I’m staying,” Yordin said, playing the game still and pulling out Xaydin’s controller.

“Bed by ten,” Zane said firmly to Yordin, who nodded half-heartedly, eyes glued to the TV. “I mean it,” he said. Another distracted nod.

“Let’s go, Xaydin,” Zane called to the now-robed eleven year-old who came running with brown slippers that used to be white.

Taking the elevator down two floors, Zane and Xaydin arrived in a humid, foggy, cavern-like room with random placements of glowing crystals, about two sets of which were identical to the eyes of the brothers Maleficent. Zane walked to one of the blue sets of crystals and pressed his finger on the most outstretched structure. After five seconds, a creak sounded from the left and a soft yellow light began to shine through the fog and even more mist rolled out.

Zane and Xaydin walked through the haze until they were in a circular room with a huge column of steam billowing from an ambiguously-shaped hole in the floor while a pool of water circled it. As Zane predicted, there was no one in there. The boys took off their robes and pulled the towels around their waists, throwing the robes into the depository.

“So Xay,” said Zane casually, “how’s life at the academy?” Zane had not been to Riverflux Academy in over a half year and dearly missed it. Zane graduated two years before he was supposed to and Xaydin had just started, so he didn’t expect to hear all the juicy details that might apply to him.

Xaydin sighed, “It sucks!” That caught Zane totally off-guard. Xaydin went on: “The girls think I think they’re ugly because I’m gay and they won’t even talk to me and the boys think I’m uber-horny for them so they make threats to me and my roommate got himself in mundo-trouble just so he didn’t have to be my roommate anymore and they all still like Yordin because he’s this big sports hero and… and he tries to include me with his friends but they all ignore me and…” a liquid that was certainly not sweat began streaming from Xaydin’s eyes.

Zane pulled his brother into a hug, squashing the boy’s head into his chest. “It’s okay,” he assured Xaydin, adding a little rock to his embrace. “I don’t want you to worry about anything, okay?” he asked.

Xaydin hiccupped, a sign Zane took to mean something along the lines of ‘okay, sure’. He let Xaydin go and thought for a moment.

How must such an introvert feel? When Zane was a nation-renowned psion and his brother was a sport-star at Riverflux Academy (which, incidentally, was not hard to do), where was gay, slacker, bookworm, alternative, techno-dweeb Xaydin supposed to fit in? The boy was sweeter than candied yams and still he could not get happiness. A quick glimpse into his head showed Zane that Xaydin’s grades were also slipping.

He closed his eyes himself and thought about what he could do. What could he possibly do to keep his brother happy and mentally healthy? He assured himself that the answer would come soon.

“Come,” Zane prodded Xaydin. He let his towel fall as he walked into the steaming water, followed by his brother. Both sitting up to their necks in scorching water, they both sighed away their troubles.

“What do you plan on doing about school?” he asked Xaydin. “Your grades are getting worse, I’m certain you’re not meeting the social quota set by the school…”

“When they kick me out, I’m going to do home schooling. That way I can get my grades and not talk to people.”

“Not a chance,” Zane said, somewhat dramatically. “I refuse to let you do something like that. You’re coming with me. I graduated with a Master Rank; I’m making you my apprentice… As soon as you change your field of study.”

“To psionics?” asked Xaydin. “Ha, not a chance. I’m good with my plan.”

“That’s a real half-assed plan, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he said, his recent moody self beginning to take over, “and I don’t care. I can keep my field of study as architecture and I can do it by myself.”

Zane sighed. This would be harder than he thought. But it would be something his brother chose to do for himself. “Whatever floats your boat, Xay. Forget I asked.”

For fifteen minutes they sat in silence, scorching water getting less hot as they got used to it. Another fifteen minutes passed and they forgot they were even at odds, for they splashed each other and swam about, carefully avoiding the center of the pool that spewed out the steam that heated the atmosphere.

A bit later, Zane and Xaydin were robed up and on the elevator when Zane suddenly brought his hand to his head, eyes and jaws clenching. Xaydin gasped, looking around, squinting as if there was something causing his brother pain that he could not see.

“Stay here,” Zane said as the doors opened. Before leaving, Zane pressed the lobby button and continued out, telling him to get out at the bottom floor and get help at the security ward. As the doors closed, Zane pulled his belt tighter around the robe and closed his eyes again, opening them with a blank expression.

Utilizing his mind’s eyesight, he saw his surroundings in a 360 degree for at least 20 yards. He saw his downstairs and their next door neighbors getting ready for bed, he saw the other next door neighbors getting intimate (he surely wished he could cut off portions of his psychic vision, for old sex was not on his list of top couples), he saw Xaydin shivering and pacing in the elevator as it went straight down the shaft, he saw Yordin under Xaydin’s bed silently crying as a sleek tall woman slunk silently about with a gun in her hand, as if searching for something… or someone.

Zane took off his slippers and focused his vision on the woman and on Yordin as he crept with his back to the wall. He grabbed a fork that one of the twins left with his plate and, as quietly as possible, levitated a bunch of knives and forks from the drawer in the kitchen. It was a little hard to focus on the scene downstairs as well as keep the silverware afloat, but he found away.

Step, step, step, step. He saw the lady coming upstairs; he physically heard the cocking of the gun. He stepped closer to the corner, waiting for her to come closer before.

BAM!

Zane had forced the woman’s finger on the trigger as the gun pointed to the stair below, barely missing her foot. She screamed and Zane rounded the corner, an army of knives surrounding him.

“Why are you here?” he asked, closing off his psionic vision and gaining strength in levitating the knives as well as simultaneously sending Yordin comforting telepathic messages.

The woman was tall and pale, with something of a green tinge to her—the black curls did nothing but enhance the pastiness of her complexion. She might have been considered beautiful—sexy, more so—but there was a certain arrogance on her face that made it otherwise. It was not a crisp, cold arrogance, but a passionate one that denoted wild insanity—albeit controlled wild insanity; an overcompensation.

“So,” Zane said, using his energy to paralyze her legs and make her drop the gun, “I’ll ask again—a courtesy that I extend only once per person—Why are you here?” Again, she did not answer. She just licked her lip madly with a single swipe of her tongue. That alone was enough to smear her black lipstick over the sides of her lips and onto her pastel complexion. “Then I will ask your mind,” he said.

The woman’s mind was something of a rally in which every listener was a zealot. It was hard to get a fix on the origins of any thought—they were scattered and came from everywhere. But the thought was not hard to understand, for there was only one.

RainStorm! RainStorm! RainStorm! It—they—chanted. Whatever was causing this—most likely a defective RainStorm System—had made her mind mushy and replaced it with this broken record player.

A little disturbed, Zane forced the light on with a psionic push and saw in her eyes a subtle change from the ones of a normal person. The pupils and irises were fine, but there was just something amiss. They were a little focused on Zane, but at the same time they seemed to look right through him.

With a little effort, Zane said to Xaydin: Don’t alert security, just be cool and stay close to them—make conversation. I’ll tell you when to come back.

He dropped the knives from the air (controlling their descent onto the nearby table) and focused his full attention on the woman ahead of him. He closed his eyes and prodded about her brain, looking for any woman who resembled her but was not a total brainwashed zealot. It was hard to find the real one—or even the leader of the zealots—due to all the mental noise and similar outfits.

Zane sighed. He was not referred to as the zenith of creative thinking for nothing. He shifted his mind into the mind of the woman once again. He was so small compared to the shrieking women and so colorless compared to their outrageous outfits that were supposed to represent RainStorm. Whatever the rain was, it certainly had nothing to do with water in this woman’s mind.

Zane made his little self inhale, taking in all the sound of the womens’ voices into his own mind. He held it in (painfully) long enough to convert the message before opening his mouth and blaring something new.

MROTSNIAR!

He fell from the woman’s mind and into his own body, a little woozy. The woman looked different—confused and disoriented. Her wild mass of curls seemed to be more defined and tamer, though her pale face and smeared black lipstick had no such change. Also, her eyes were no longer a paradox. There was no underlying intent or anything else.

“So,” the woman said, gaining her wits before Zane, “I suppose you wont ask me a third time why I am here, will you?”

Zane nodded a little dumbly, eyes lidded and breath just getting back to him. “You can answer.”

“RainStorm,” she said sharply. Zane snapped at attention. “Sorry, I just didn’t want you to be dazed forever. Also, that’s part of my answer. I work for RainStorm.”

“Excuse me?” asked Zane, nostrils flaring and hands balling. Behind him, the knives danced silently on the table. The woman had obviously seen this (even if Zane had no knowledge of his subconscious working), for she clarified with haste.

“Worked. I worked for RainStorm… As the director of programs and facilities. I was dismissed when I found out what the RainStorm System did to people’s minds. It was not meant to give them psionic abilities, but to make them more susceptible to the psionic-imitating wavelengths distributed from RainStorm Headquarters and therefore more controllable.

“I boned up on research and found that there was a ninety-nine percent guarantee that whoever utilized the RainStorm System was going to be controlled, for it bypasses the will of the user and goes straight to the mind. In order to be immune, you’ve got to shut off your mind all together—and how many people can do that?”

Zane nodded. “But why are you here?”

She blushed a bit. “Erm… I was at your seminar earlier this evening. By the time I found out what RainStorm was for, I wanted protection from the one rival of the System: You. You knew RainStorm didn’t do what it promised and I wanted to help you—as well as not be assassinated—as you took them down.

“Of course, it would be just my luck that as I’m leaving the seminar a guy comes to me and hands me a gun before saying something—can’t remember what it was for the life of me—and suddenly, I’m in the backseat while my body is on autopilot. My body walked all the way from the Civic Center to this complex. The only thing I could do to override the feeling the entire night since that meeting with the odd man was scream when the gun sounded.”

Zane nodded. He closed his eyes and went back into her mind for a quick second. After his shriek, there were a lot of damaged RainStorm zealots. Only one was alive and was trying desperately to revive her sisters. Sage reared his fist and punched the zealot out with so much force that the woman’s mind did not even enact the laws of physics to slow her down. He came back to.

“You should have no more RainStorm problems,” Zane said. “At any rate, I’ve got to get my brothers. Mi casa es su casa; there’s a room on the lower floor you can have until the morning—it won’t feel right trying to get you home at this hour at night.”

“Thank you, Zane Castillo-Maleficent. I greatly appreciate this.”

“No problem… Umm…”

“Vitia; Vitia Vitriol.”

“Okay, Vitia.”

(Ω)

The night proved quite interesting. Zane had to explain to Xaydin everything that happened in the penthouse, Yordin was so afraid to Vitia that he skipped second dinner and went straight to bed. When he learned that she was sleeping on the same floor as his room, he threw something of a fit and demanded to sleep in Zane’s bed—with Zane still in it. He apparently had a twin-to-twin telepathic moment with Xaydin, for the latter also demanded that he be able to sleep in Zane’s bed.

Zane explained to Vitia that she had truly spooked Yordin with the gun and the breaking in and the whole nine yards. Vitia had understood, but still seemed a little disheartened. Zane promised that he would get the twins in a better state of being before long.

After the twins were sound asleep, Zane got up and joined Vitia at the kitchen table where the gun lay in the middle.

“So what can be done about this?” asked Vitia, afraid of touching the gun. Zane surveyed it, putting it on lock mode psychokinetically and levitating it, rotating it on all its angles. In his mind’s eyesight, he saw tiny fingerprints and oils. He himself was not going to touch it, so scrying was out of the question.

“I’m going to burn off the fingerprints. You don’t know the man who handled the weapon and there’s no telling how many handled it before him. I’m not taking any chances with the police.” In only a second, small flames burst from random points on the weapon. The oils were being burned away as Zane concentrated hard on the gun. When it was done, he bagged it and used mass forces of psychokineses to crush it.

“All gone,” he marveled at the can-shaped former weapon. It had taken the better half of twenty minutes to get it down to half of its former dark glory. “Now if I could bend metal like this on a larger scale then I could end gun violence…”

“Not now, sweetie,” said Vitia. “Thanks again, but I’m a little worn. I’m going to go to bed. I’ll use the generic toiletries and I’ll be out before you guys wake up.” She used her long acid green fingernail to etch some numbers lightly into the wooden table. “That’s my number. Call it when you’re back in Bellevue.”

Zane nodded. “Goodbye, Vitia.”

“Goodbye, Zane.” She kissed his forehead (leaving even more black smeared lipstick he was sure) and slunk downstairs, curves waxing and waning back and forth on their own accord.

He shook his head. Sometimes he wondered what it was like to have feelings for the supple figures of women. Of course, he knew that he was just that—a wonder. The most women did for him was make him appreciate life and its virtues. More women than men, it seemed, had a flair for the lifewoven things and subtleties of concepts and practices. He was envious of them until he realized that he had the same flair—along with the power of aggressive drive and overt force that more men than women had.

As the minutes dragged on, Zane dragged himself back to his bed to see the Xaydin at the furthermost side of the bed with his cap-wrapped head at the foot of the bed and Yordin with his head at the head of the bed. Zane realized that this arrangement meant that his head was at the foot of the bed. He grabbed a pillow and lay down, not quite asleep but still not very awake.

He turned on his mind’s eyesight and saw that the twins’ auras were at good levels—Yordin’s showed evidence of still a little shaken up but that was to be expected. The three families on the next level down were doing well. Vitia was just getting to sleep but had made a mental note to wake up at some ungodly four o’ clock in the morning. Zane chuckled. It was already two-fifteen.

Yordin shifted, making Zane have to shift as well to avoid a foot to the head. Zane sighed and continued looking around with his mindsight. A few birds were sitting on the ledge of the window, their sleepy thoughts on food; a security guard was making his rounds on the next level down; and the newborn from the family below was wailing about general discomfort. Nothing interesting.

He was finally able to rest his mind and doze off to sleep, though it only felt like a second. The twins jumped out of bed (unsynchronized bouncing making it hard to stay asleep) and yelled through the intercom to the chefs in the kitchen, debating what would be best for breakfast. Yordin seemed to have forgotten all about Vitia’s scare last night. Dreams really do help calm people down.

Zane realized that Vitia had left as she said she would, so he didn’t feel obligated to tell Yordin—especially considering the fact that he was just fine without even thinking about it. He took himself to the intercom and overrode the boys’ voices.

“Mr. Lasius, we won’t be needing anything this morning. I think the boys are just a little overzealous with this whole ‘call for food’ concept. I’ll make them something to eat.”

Yordin and Xaydin both looked at each other with disgusted expressions. “Why’re you cooking for us!” exclaimed Yordin with something of a fearful undertone.

“He wants to kill us!” Xaydin yelled just as loud, pulling the white cap off of his head to reveal tightly pressed curls. They both ran about, flittering here and there, hiding behind things for moments at a time before seeking temporary refuge somewhere else. Zane sighed and got out a few pans.

“Doom!” yelled both Yordin and Xaydin as they ran out of hiding spots and ran downstairs. A second later, Yordin screamed and ran back upstairs, arms grasping for Zane’s waist as he pulled the latter around (making him spill a cup of water) so that he was behind the psion.

“That woman is down there!” he screamed. Xaydin also ran upstairs, though much later than his brother, who truly had a reason to be frightened. He was also much less hysterical. How was he to explain to his eleven year old brothers that the woman was being controlled by an evil capitalist company? For that matter, how was he supposed to go about getting the thing shut down when he could not even go to the government for fear that they would discredit him even more than they had. He could only take it one bridge at a time.

“Vitia left early in the morning,” Zane explained. “Besides, it was just a practical joke gone wrong—that’s why we were all fooled.” Zane was not much of a liar, but he had the trust of his brothers. He hated to betray that trust, but he could not find a way to explain to them that a deranged-looking woman (even after her change of heart, she still looked quite unkempt) who wound up in their penthouse apartment without so much as a forced-open door or broken window was doing it all for a practical joke.

“See,” Zane continued, lying through his teeth, “I left the door unlocked so that she could get inside and I gave her the code earlier when I was out.”

Neither of the boys (especially Yordin) seemed to buy it, but they at least let it marinate around their minds. That was the first step to totally accepting an idea: Justifying it. The second was to investigate the source, but they would not not believe their truthful-until-this-point brother. The last part was the actual acceptance, but that depended on the strength of the first two.

Zane almost asked them to trust him, but he could not even articulate the words, they were so misleading. “It’ll get better,” he said, looking at Yordin, but thinking of himself. He added mentally to himself, I’ll get better.

Breakfast was a solemn event. Runny eggs and too-crispy bacon lined the middle of the table, while the items most utilized were the juices as a way to fill up their stomachs without Zane’s monstrosities to kill them. Zane was the recipient of many glares from his brothers, whose orange-juice mustaches made it hard for him to take them seriously. The twins kept muttering something about seeing a half-formed chicken in the uncooked yolk of the eggs. Zane had thought they were just being crazy before his mindsight forced a vision onto him and he saw the outline of a chick in the yolk. He vowed to become a vegetarian for at least two months.

(Ω)