As I have recently been heavily irradiated and one of our number has written his name in twenty fucking mile tall letters on China, it occurs to me that I may not make it out of this mess alive. If I do, I can look back at this record as a fond and hopefully distant memory of a time that sucked hard. I've isolated myself from the others for the time being in hopes of limiting whatever radiation I seem to have been exposed to. With a lack of anything else to do I've been thinking, a wholly dangerous pass-time for a telepath, so I'm busying myself by writing this.
Goddamn but I would do terrible things for an apple pie right now...
My name, as you may be aware, is Marcus Crenshaw. I am the (adopted) son of Arnelius and Hillary Crenshaw of The Town (or The City, Seattle, New York, or a dozen other major metropolitan areas). The being-ships identify me as The Architect - whatever that means. In the last several months I've done things that a lot of people probably won't believe, that even more would be appalled by, and that I frequently attempt to justify to myself were the right thing to do.
I am some kind of psychic. I don't mean that in any sort of glib way but only in the most literal. I have the ability to read and influence the thoughts of others and move objects with my mind. My friends and allies have diverse abilities that I won't attempt to catalog here but will probably come up during this account. None of them display the same set of abilities that I do. The abilities that I have witnessed so far do not seem to repeat frequently, but there are instances of duplicate abilities. I can conclude from this that our abilities are not necessarily unique amongst our number, but any given set of powers seems to be relative rare.
Only a few of us have been recognized by the being-ships. They call us officers. I am the Architect, Damien is the Judge, Henry is the Interceptor. There may be others, but we just don't know at this point. The beings and their interfaces seem to either lack information or obliquely avoid answering questions on the topic. In either even they don't seem to be able to find more, but they can identify them when they're on board. Note to self: investigate whether active scanning can detect or identify reinforcements or officers. The others they call reinforcements. The being-ships seem willing to follow the commands only of those designated as officers or those appointed by officers.
We're still working out what, exactly, sets officers apart from other super-powered individuals. There aren't many criteria to work from - we don't have wholly unique abilities - each of us has at least one power that we've witnessed in others. We do seem to have a slightly broader array of abilities than the others, so that might be part of it. They also seem to be more potent, but that's hard to gauge. Damien can destroy heavy artillery with an almost trivial ease, I can lift several tons without touching it and Henry can boost mundane physical abilities to insanely superhuman levels (and copy the powers (and appearance) of everyone he's cared to try that trick with so far). On the other hand, William wrote his name on China - though he was in the Weapons Theater of one of the being-ships at the time (the Weapons Theaters have some sort of boosting effect on our abilities). Similarly, Velvet seems to be able to boost any of our abilities to absolutely insane levels without apparent effort - so gauging general power level is hard. Just about the only criteria I can think of that sets us apart is our learning curve and, it seems, ability to develop new powers over time. All three of us have come a long, long way from the first time we used our powers. We've all manifested new abilities that we didn't have when we first awoke to our abilities - Henry has become some sort of omnilinguist and gained some ability to change his size without also imitating other people, Damien can now change into the dark energy-stuff he controls, and I have picked up telekinesis.
We're (almost) all super human, but it’s hard to say more than that. It’s hard to say if we're even human anymore. We all identify as human, and we still look human (at least when not using powers). Several of the exotic individuals we've met with have implied that we (at least the three officers) are not human, though. Who can say?
I've mentioned the being-ships several times. They are individually called Tetra and Virgil. I won't really go into what they're capable of here as a vague sort of security measure, but they've done a lot to help educate us on whatever it is that's been going on. We don't know where they came from, but they're our allies for now, it seems, and we need all of those we can get.
Anyway, skipping a lot of what happened in the middle for now, I seem to have been irradiated. I'm not terribly surprised. I did a stupid thing: I touched a star. Sometimes you just have to do these things though. The star, in this case, is some sort of engine/reactor for an alien spacecraft. It is also alive - a living warp drive. Anyway, it was about to go critical and destroy Earth and a whole lot of other nearby planets, so we stepped in to stop it. I made mental contact with it, talked to the others, and we formulated a plan to get it the hell out of the Solar System. But first we had to calm it down enough to move it. So I made mental contact, approached, and touched it.
I suppose I should explain: making mental contact with other humans is pretty easy. I've been doing it for months now, and it’s as natural as breathing. Aliens are a different matter, and yes, I've made mental contact with aliens. This thing though? It’s not even humanoid. Hell, it’s not even solid. It was some sort of matter/energy thing. I called it a star and that's exactly what it looked like. It looked like a pure white star about the size of a Suburban. It used to be that to influence the minds of others I had to be able to see them. I've worked past that, but it still makes it easier. Touching people? Forget about it. Contact makes things way easier. I needed to make things way easier, so I touched the star.
Long story short, it went out enough to let Damien move it. Meanwhile I'm dying of radiation poisoning. I never saw it directly, but I'm pretty sure I lost my left hand (which had touched it), and one or both of my legs along with most or all of my internal organs. Damien got me to Carmelita and her miraculous healing abilities before I died and she was able to put me back together.
But I had touched a star, and apparently that sort of thing has consequences. My regenerated flesh registers as radioactive. It’s clearly different - when we went to the Eye of Darkness (which I'll explain at some other point), I was glowing white like the star had been. The craziest bit, though? I can feel it.
I've spent a lot of my isolation meditating - or something. I've never really meditated before, but I'm focusing inside-not-outside, so I guess that's it. Focusing outside is a bad thing for me; as a telepath I'll just hear all sorts of things people are thinking and that I don't want to know about. The focus of my efforts have mostly been on this radiation in my body. We have reason to believe it originates from a place called The Cosmic Heart. I believe I may be able to use this opportunity to gain some sort of control over that energy in the same way that Damien controls the energies of the Eye of Darkness. I just hope that our capacity for developing new powers includes this as an avenue so that I am not wasting my time. If I can, I think it will be a powerful and useful weapon against our enemy: space midgets.
No, really. Space midgets. The Rapporum (nearest spelling I can come up with) are a race of humanoids that are only a few feet tall. In spite of that, they've apparently conquered a human amount of space and destroyed or enslaved every other race they've encountered. They gained access to the Comic Heart at some point and enslaved the creatures they found there to power their starships. That's the tiny star I mentioned earlier. It is my hope that developing some measure of control over that energy will help us to neutralize their technology and weapons. If it’s anything like the weird stuff Damnien pulls from the Eye of Darkness, it’s probably also got a bunch of properties we know nothing about that might be helpful. I can't even speculate as to what. Something.
That's probably about enough for a first entry. If I keep this up, I'll try to explain a bit more about what we've been doing for the last several months. For now our plans are remarkably mundane for such an exceptional group of people - we're going to college. Provided the college will remain standing long enough for us to attend it. I'm wary of planning anything more than a few days in advance at this point - between the Chinese and alien invasions, visiting the two largest moons in the solar system to deal with the aliens that were on each (and they're still on our Moon), and dealing with constant threats to myself, the people under my protection, the place where I live, or the world, I've given up on long term planning. Except for this, I guess. We're going to college. After we're done, maybe I'll buy Disney World.