Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Young Telepath

Xi'an chills with his dad in their 99¢ Store on Sorgum Ave.  He's got the gift, as they say.  6th Borough
telepathy is fairly common (it's those darn Candy Vapors) -- it's just not that powerful.
At best it's like making a cell phone call, but most of the time it's really impossible
 to actually zero in on the person with whom you'd like to speak (think).  You try to holler at your
friend's brain, and you wind up landing on the old lady that lives next door -- and she's so lonely,
she basically won't let you out of her head radius for like an hour.  It's not as easy as you might
think.  There's so much junk in a person's head, it's not like you can just figure them out cause you
make it past the front gate.  You're still blind to their info.  If a person is neat, it's like finding
yourself in a big office building, with people working in cubicles, tons of filing cabinets, and some
aggressive boss.  If a person is more interesting, well then it's like finding that warehouse of super-junk
stacked to the ceiling, with some cool song pumping at max volume.  Maybe you start looking
around and maybe you find some cool stuff -- but it's gonna be hard to find something specific that
you might actually be fiending to know.
You might think you can figure out if they're lying or what they really thought of your short story,
but for the most part it's impossible.  Better off asking point blank. 
Xi'an also can do some amateur telekinetics, but his dad's got him training with one of the old Venusian
Wish Specialists to enhance that back-brain technique that Venusians call Molding aka
Real Time Wish Fulfillment.  Making something appear out of thin air.  You might think this
sounds awesome, but in order to be able to make anything actually valid appear, the Molder needs
to understand the insides of a thing, otherwise it's just a shell that'll melt after a few days.  Most
Molders wind up working for Novelty companies that make cheap plastic toys, hence their name.