Kid Omega

Bending quick to snatch it up he scowled, “You should be careful.” and practically hid behind the book once more. 

“Let’s call a spade a spade here, I’m a telepath and you’re a racist. You look down on our kind, blame us for everything that happens and think being an ordinary human would make you better than us. Newsflash, shitstain, the world was fucked up long before mutants showed up and everyone has been blaming everyone else for it since the beginning of time, we’re just the new scapegoats so people like you can feel better about themselves and say ‘we’re not doing anything wrong, it’s them, they’re the ones messing everything up’.” He was in the boy’s face now, his own contorted with anger.

“The UN incident, really?” Sophie asked.

“I’m fairly certain at least a couple of the things on that list are criminal,” said Celeste, narrowing her eyes at him. A couple of others were not, and she wasn’t sure about one of them, because laws regulating purely psychic actions didn’t really exist.

There were debates about regulating what couldn’t be physically proven - at least, there were debates about issues like that within the confines of this campus. The concentration of telepaths here created some rather different priorities from the general population. The obvious question: did they eventually risk punishing thoughtcrime? All of them dipped into other people’s minds from time to time. Anyone would, presented with the temptation and the capacity, and non-telepaths insisting otherwise had never truly been in that situation.

But something like making people confess their darkest secrets in public tiptoed carefully along that ethical line. Were they doing more good than harm by revealing it? (They didn’t know his intentions, so they were setting that question aside for the present.) Or did they risk a slippery slope, where no one had any measure of privacy?

“It’s mostly important not to cross streams, that’s how you get confused,” Phoebe explained. “Like reading the same book, someone skipping ahead a few pages. It’s similar enough that you can mix it up, versus one reading that book and one looking through sheet music.”

“The blind one, you mean?” Esme asked, rolling her eyes. “I’m only half convinced she’s really telepathic and not just talking nonsense because she knows no one would say otherwise.”

“I think there was someone we couldn’t read the other day, though,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.

“Doesn’t guarantee they were telepathic, in fairness,” said Sophie.

“Of they absolutely were, I was in a cell before I came here. Apparently it’s frowned upon to have politicians speak truth, what with all the lies and bullshit that usually flows out of their mouths. Still, it was so worth it to hear an anti-American dictator confess that he actually loved America.” He quickly stopped laughing, shoving his hands into his pockets and taking on a much more serious tone.

“I despise hypocrisy. It’s worse than lying. When you lie, you’re saying something that isn’t true. You are stating a falsehood as fact to serve a purpose, either to save your ass, cover someone else’s, or some other purpose. Lying I understand, everybody lies, including myself. But being a hypocrite...if there’s not a special place in Hell for that kind of person, I’m going to build it myself when I get there. Because being a hypocrite isn’t lying, it’s not even twisting words or events to suit a purpose. It’s telling Person A never to slap Person B in the face, slapping the Person B in the face yourself and not thinking you did anything wrong, but getting upset when Person A calls you on it or does it themselves.” He was getting worked up and his mind was responding, psychic energy building up around him.

“It’s telling someone to follow their dreams and desires because they are extraordinary and they can achieve anything they set their minds to, and then punishing them for having dreams or desires because don’t line up with your personal beliefs. It’s judging others while feeling that you yourself shouldn’t be judged.” The energy now pulsed out in waves of psychic power, emanating from Qeuntin’s mind. They weren’t dangerous or harmful, but they were powerful and he wasn’t even putting any effort into generating them.

“Call me a bastard, call me evil, call me unlovable, call me an asshole. Say whatever the hell you want, but make it have a purpose, whether it is your opinion or a lie. I am a liar, I can respect liar, hell I can love a liar, but don’t pin your beliefs on me and the rest of the world and tell me to follow them when you are so far up your own ass that you think they apply to everyone except you.” It was clear that this hatred stemmed from personal experience, that he had been on the receiving end of such hypocrisy and that event or person had poisoned him against the purposefully contradictory behavior and that it had shaped him as a person.

He noticed what he was doing and reigned in his power, pulling back until it vanished. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for that to happen...Look, I’m not a good person. I’m not a bad person. There is no clear line that divides people like that, no one is wholly good or wholly bad and to think that there are is the greatest act of stupidity. I’ve done good and I’ve done bad, people are far more intimately complex than even telepaths like us can fully comprehend. We can see what a person thinks, how they think, and what they’ve done, but in the end that’s all we see. Can we predict how they will act in the future? No. We can roughly say what they might do, but there is no true certainty. People can change, people can surprise you. The dumbest person on the planet is capable of surprising the smartest one, it’s just not probable that they will.” He was looking at Sophie as he spoke, but this time he wasn’t showing favoritism toward the sister he wanted to address, he was simply pointing his head at her as hers addressed all of them, even sending out mental echoes of his words to the other sisters to show that he was indeed addressing each of them equally.

“Monsters aren’t born. They are created. By a cruel world. Filled with cruel people.” It wasn’t clear if this was further personal insight, or a continued commentary on the arbitrary and often unfair classification of people in general.

There it was, and they were genuinely surprised he would admit such a thing so readily. He wasn’t just dangerous to them for what they knew, for what they were, he was probably rather too powerful for his own good. Psi-powers like theirs made a lot of the world a playground. The average human had no idea that they existed or how to adapt to that. They were really only held in check by the existence of other telepaths, people on their level who would prevent them from getting out of hand if they were ever of a mind to become a menace. Sort of like the presence of different personalities in the collective kept Esme from ever causing too much damage, they sought to mitigate her worst impulses so that they could all continue to live in the world.

A single mind, alone, with the feeling of being untouchable?

“So you get…bored?” Sophie asked, frowning pensively.

Even if he didn’t start out wanting to be a threat, it would be such a simple slope down to it. The maddening temptation to try something new with the realization that no one could stop it. That sort of impulse existed in their own mind, somewhere. Being made to sit in a class and fill out the same test five times over left a bright, buzzing psychic collective itching for a greater challenge. There were better angels tucked away somewhere in their nature. For all the blighted good it did to go charging into dangerous situations and play rescuer in their more vulnerable state. Dwelling on that would only invite more trouble, for now.

“More interesting question: minds on campus you just can’t get a read on at all,” said Esme.

Celeste rolled her eyes. “Not phrased in the form of a question.”

“All right, are there any, and how do you cope with the uncertainty of it,” Esme retorted. “If anyone else has pedantic questions resolve them quickly. Yes I’m thinking about you Phoebe. Eyes forward.”

“Frequently, but I always eventually find ways to fill my time, whether it be creating an entire world in my mind, crafting a mental armory, coming back from physical death, attempting to destroy a nation, forcing world leaders at the U.N. to spill their darkest secrets in front of everyone. You know, little things to keep myself occupied. You might have even seen that last one since it was televised though I never did get credit for it.” He said, laughing, but also completely serious about having done everything on the aforementioned list.

“I have a feeling you are similarly affected, especially since everything must feel incredibly repetitive, so I can sympathize on some level even though I’m only processing information once rather than five times in succession or all at the same time.” He said, understanding better than most how one’s mind could be insufficiently occupied and knowing that it was most certainly a downside of their hive mind, though he still believed the benefits of increased ability and power to outweigh the negatives.

“She knows it’s there,” said Phoebe, tapping her temple thoughtfully. “She picked up on it right away when we met her, but she never really dug into it.”

“She may have been polite to a degree, not prying into our personal business, but at a certain point there were…she was curious and wanted to know something, but never found it out until we actually told her,” Sophie said.

They paused abruptly, all staring at him. If he had any chance of thinking fast enough to actually read their hive mind, he was dangerous. Their secrets had been safe from all of the high-order telepaths cruising the campus because those telepaths had all been powerful and trained, but not enough to keep up with their collective intelligence whirring at full speed. It had been security enough before, but they were suddenly left uncertain. Was that why he had made such a beeline toward them?

“You’re keeping count, then?” Esme asked, giving him a wry smirk.

Was it better to keep him talking or flee now? They were all on campus together, there was nowhere for them to go that would completely escape the problem.

Fingers raked through pink hair as he debated his next words. “...I’m going to do something I usually wouldn’t and give you a piece of advice about me. Don’t hint, indicate, or suggest that there would be something worth scanning your minds for because I have shitty impulse control and as Frost will be more than happy to tell you, I have a strong tendency to be a massive asshole. I mean, hell, the whole reason I followed your telepathic signatures was because I could immediately tell that they were unique and couldn’t resist finding out more.”

That was one of the greatest compliments he could give since it took a special kind of person for Quentin to actually be interested in them. He laughed at Esme’s question. “It’s honestly not intentional, it’s just that my mind works so fast that I know it without having to put a huge amount of effort into thinking about it. And you don’t have to take my word for it either, Frost can confirm it herself.“

“Really?” Sophie asked, now curious enough to respond for herself. “We’d never met another telepath before we enrolled here, though there are a few. We’re statistically unusual out in the rest of the world.”

There were a number of people on this campus who had telepathic abilities, though they had slightly different forms and functions. They were most like Emma, of course, for obvious reasons they would not be sharing with a brand new face with an eerie silence. Then there was that weird girl. She was a telepath of a sort, but not quite like them, they didn’t think. And there were others, or at least some sort of telepathic signal on campus that they didn’t recognize.

“What do you mean?” asked Esme, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Our -” Celeste stopped short.

“I think he can, actually,” said Irma.

“How peculiar,” said Sophie.

“You can tell that the hive mind is here,” Phoebe clarified. “You can sense it? Even Miss Frost, she can identify it and grab surface thoughts but she can’t tap into the full processing. It seems it processes too much for a single mind to keep up with it. We don’t precisely count.”

He was honestly surprised at their surprise. He didn’t know what it was like to be a less powerful telepath so there was no way for him to know that they would have trouble sensing what he could. He wasn’t even trying to be insulting with this way of thinking, he just truly couldn’t see it from their perspective. To him their ‘hive mind’ as they called it was obviously present.

“She can’t?” He was back to addressing Sophie, taking her return into the conversation as permission to do so. Normally that would have led to a comment about how he was better than Emma in yet another way, but not this time.

“I feel sorry for her then because it truly is something to behold a construct of this magnitude and beauty, the way your minds and thoughts are interwoven and connected. It may be that I’m only able to sense it this clearly because I’ve created mental constructs capable of housing the consciousness’ of multiple people within them and it’s a similar concept. Then again it could be something as simple as having enough processing power to fully appreciate your ‘hive mind’ since my brain can process ten million thoughts per second.”

“Telepath, we presume?” they answered together, staring apprehensively at the boy with vibrant hair.

They hadn’t heard him approach, and they couldn’t sift through his thoughts even now, and they didn’t like that…absence of thoughts. It didn’t make sense. Even if someone had some shielding in place, they could sense that it was there. There was something unnerving about this Quentin Quire and his see-through mind, coupled with something rather annoying about his immediate presumption. They locked down their hive mind’s rapid-processing, though they were hesitant about going diamond immediately, given the side effects.

“We’re the Cuckoos,” said Celeste.

“We’re not the only telepaths on campus,” Phoebe answered. Sophie hadn’t failed to notice his stare, so she had directed them to divert the attention. “If you’re new, the person you’re really looking for is Emma Frost.”

“And a little more than that.” He said, not revealing his telekinetic abilities or that his telepathic abilities were beyond far superior to the average telepath. Quire wasn’t one to be shy about his powers, but he was infinitely more intrigued by them than expounding on his own greatness, which was a massive compliment coming from him.

He frowned a bit at the mention of Emma. “I may be new here, but Emma Frost and I are well acquainted, though I doubt ‘acquaintance’ is the first ‘a’ word she would use to describe me.” He smiled at the name they collectively called themselves. “Since we’re sharing, I also go by Kid Omega.” It bothered him somewhat that the sister he wished would do the talking wasn’t and knew it was a conscious choice, though he did not let on and turned his head when the others spoke

He wasn’t trying to pry this time, but that much brain power working together was still very much detectable and utterly fascinating. “It’s truly amazing, with your minds working together like I have to ask, at peak efficiency how many thoughts per second can you process?” He was genuinely interested, it was so rare to encounter someone, or in this case people, who had enough brain power to justify the question.