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Psions Unite! : Chapter 2.6 : Desmond Barnes


Rorx

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Desmond quickly signed the requisite form after glancing over its brief contents and grabbibg one of the business cards in passing headed out of the lounge and onto the concourse. Finding his way back to the plane to get his carry on luggage proved more difficult and Desmind was forced to ask for directions from staff several times. However once he had collected his things, and noted that the few other peoples effects were being boxed up, it was easy to follow the signs to Baggage Reclaim.

The large hall seemed quiet with just the passengers from his plane present, the other 5 carousels sitting emoty and still. Some of the people seemed to be in shock and some openly grieving, which reminded Desmond that not everyone had survived the process in the cocoons. With his new found senses he could pick out the other psychics from the Lounge amongst the crowd.

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At first, Desmond tried taking a mental head-count of all the people who gave off the peculiar sensation of being psychically endowed, but he shook that impulse off in order to focus on the  issue at hand.  First he would have to review his travel arrangements and make sure there were no cancellations, next he needed to get to his hotel and setup an e-conference with Winslow discussing the findings of the latest project.  His conversation with Gwyn left him with some lingering anxiety; even now there were talented peoples being rounded up in certain countries and doubtlessly turned towards the purpose of whichever regime controlled their lives, even if that wouldn't be the case immediately in the states he needed to be at the forefront of such an initiative so that he might head off the more Orwellian aspects of it.

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Desmond was relieved to find that the Conference in Oxford had been put back by a day, and that the hotels had likewise just shifted things back a day. From what the receptionist at the first hotel had said it had been adopted as the standard response by all companies to the interrupted day caused by the cocoons.

 

Rather than risking the unknowns of the London Underground Desmond opted for a taxi to his hotel nearby Paddington station from which his morning train would take him to his Conference in Oxford. A brief check of the conference website showed that the only one of the speakers was so far known to be unable to attend - Prof Nakamura didn't survive his cocoon, but that a few still had to report in.

 

Once at the Hilton near Paddington, he got comfortable in his room and set up his laptop to try to catch Winslow for an e-conference. Much to his frustration no-one was answering at the office, although he belatedly realised it was now 2 am in Seattle compared with the 10 am in London. Now he just had to work out what to do for the next 6-7 hours until someone was likely to be in the office again.

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Unfortunately, the time spent in his cocoon took "sleep' off the the list of options, leaving him at the mercy of the timezone shift.  Eventually he opted to merely settle for perusing the local London news broadcasts.  He'd had a passing thought of making a few experimental tests her in his hotel room, but thought better of it as any results he'd gather would be questionable at best lacking proper equipment.  By now he'd forced himself into a 'non-receptive' state of mind where he could focus more on the actual happenings around him rather than be distracted by the higher senses he'd been endowed with.  While sitting there letting the news play he allowed his senses to reach outward again and see how much of an area they encompassed.

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Playing with his new senses didn't seem to tire him at all and he found that at the moment at least he had three distinct new senses, all of which seemed to vary in the detail they provided each time he activated them. This variability was unfortunate but seemed to be inevitable, perhaps tapping into psychic phenomena was inherently unstable in some way?

 

The first sense was the one he had first noticed while still inside the cocoon, the sort of radar like ability to sense the presence of other psychics and to a lesser extent the use of psychic abilities. Unfortunately the sense didn't come with any sense of scale, just near or further away. However, by calling up Google maps on his laptop and comparing various scales around his location with the mass of presences he felt he was confident that he could cover a pretty large area of the centre of Greater London. His range obviously did not get close to the edge or as far as the M25 as the thousands of presences he felt did not seem to dwindle away as you'd expect at the less populated edges of London.

 

A second sense seemed to be only line of sight, and fairly close ranged at that. This sense was an awareness of the major electrical and EM wave sources in the area. So Desmond could see a light trace on or just above the wallpaper where the power lines run around the walls and a slight pulsing dim glow from across the road where a cell repeater was on the roof of a nearby building.

 

His last new sense is another 'radar' type one since it was a full spherical sense and more easily measured. It was always the same size but the details he could 'feel' with it varied. Out to approximately (he didn't have a tape measure with him) 6m he could feel the presence of all material objects, in a full sphere. So he could feel the tv remote on the bed next to him, the bath in the ensuite and people walking along the corridor both outside his room and in the corridors in the floor above and below him. By moving closer to the walls he could also feel which of the rooms around him were currently occupied.

 

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Sifting through these impressions Desmond tried quantifying them by function.  "This first one...this is sensing the other talents, so it must be related to some underlying wave pattern all talents share.  This second one is clearly based upon electromagnetic variations, so what is this third sense?"  He picked up a remote and held it loosely for a second, then left it floating in the air as he took his hand away.  He'd shut out all his other sensory feeds in the process so he could focus on what was going on right in front of him.  He'd assumed he was going to feel some kind of EM force wave as he'd assumed what he was doing was some form of diamagnetism, but that did not appear to be the case.  Despite how much he concentrated on keeping the two effects up, he in no way sensed any electromagnetism at work while levitating the remote.  The incongruity of the third sense continued to puzzle him until he shut his eyes and sat down with it still engaged.  He'd let the remote fall but he still had a clear sense of where it was.  That gave him another idea; he kept his eyes closed and walked to his bathroom to retrieve a toothbrush from his toiletries, finding that he could do so without actually slamming into a wall or tripping over anything.  After the fourth time he spun in a circle to make himself dizzy and still managed to walk across the hotel room unerringly to find some random object, he realized that this was some kind of hyper-advanced positioning sense.  What it was based off of eluded him but he resolved to figure it out once he had access to some testing equipment.  After he'd exhausted himself again he sat there perplexed and waiting for the time lines to line up to where he could call back to the labs in the US.

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