aberrantangels | Mar. 18th, 2007

Mind games, board games.

March 18
[Aberrant] The Directive intercepts Teragen member Cornelius White's phone conversation with an unidentified party about the torture of Directive agent Martin Fuller, who had been using the name "Joshua Ballantrae" to contact the Terats.

After about three months of acquaintance, "Josh" started asking one of White's friends, one "Mimi" (no other name given), some questions. "Where was she from, what was her eruption like, what did she think about Utopia. Crap like that." Mimi, figuring "Josh" was trying to seduce her, scanned his mind and found it opaque:

She got nursery rhymes and math equations. She got old show tunes. She didn't get any surface thoughts and couldn't go deep at all. [She] says it wasn't a q-power. The guy was using mind games to block her out. Strange thing is, he didn't even seem to be trying, it was, like, built into his brain.

Mimi told Cornelius, and while she was keeping "Josh"... occupied, White called in "the Hare", presumably a fellow Terat. The Hare found four state-of-the-art surveillance gadgets in the clothes "Josh" wasn't wearing, so they decided to take "Josh" someplace private and give him the third (or higher) degree.

It took them much of an hour to get his real name and a fake allegiance (FBI/Utopia). He remained resistant to Mimi's mental powers (thanks to the training the Directive calls "Thought Discipline"), but when White and the Hare started removing his fingernails and teeth with pliers, he began to sing.

White was just about to wrap up his report-in and join the Hare in testing what White might be holding back when the Directive rescue team broke down the door. The last sounds on the transmission are the explosion of a stun grenade and gunfire from a Directive-issue weapon. Agent Fuller was recovered ~~alive, well and of normal size~~ alive and intact, and didn't reveal his Directive allegiance nor the names of any of his cell. "Speaker B remain[s] unidentified and unaccounted for."