#telepath amber

forge is such a goober, i love him

i did end up getting really attached to atticus, and now i'm glad we've been seeing more of him in the later books in the series. i hope he continues to be a major player in the series!

wow, shanna is REALLY catty. i already disliked her after what she did during uhhhh....new year i think? idr it's been a while. but man, seeing the way she treated everyone in her corridor, i'm glad that forge and amber ended up seeing her true self after lottery

on that note...i'm like lowkey on the forge/atticus bandwagon now. i love buzz, but i never really cared for her relationship with forge either way, and i think the whole best friends to lovers thing would be fantastic for forge/atticus. atticus spending all their years on teen level with what he thought would always be an unrequited crush? him seeing shanna for who she really was and being bitter because even if it wasn't him, he thought forge deserved better!!! and then parting ways after lottery, expecting never to see him again, and then learning the truth about the telepaths and finding out that amber was one of them!! and that forge was on her strike team!!! i just think it would be cute. maybe au where atticus ends up on the medical team of amber's unit.

on another note, it was interesting to see the hints of amber's telepathy peeking through the mental block. there was the thing where she made the "lucky guess" about the bulkhead doors, but there was also later when she was in the park and she heard celeste crying even though the music was way too loud and atticus didn't hear anything.

But we know that true telepaths must be able to read them, because morton's unit rescued amber after she was kidnapped by elden as a child, and he definitely would have noticed if there was something off about her. But that could just have been because of how young she was

Would signs start showing up as amber got older?

Claire died when Amber was 15...I wonder what Amber's life would have been like if her dad was raised by his birth parents, and Amber got to know that whole side of the family.

Would Claire have known?

Would Amber have grown up as a pampered golden child?

like, i'm specifically thinking about a part in borderline where they had a team leader meeting right after a run, and amber says something about they usually don't have snacks during their meetings. megan replies that they usually don't have meetings right after runs, and that amber hadn't eaten anything since that morning.

amber notes, but doesn't say out loud, that no one else had eaten yet either, but that megan doesn't care about that.

and that just illustrates a big part of the problem, right?

adika has mentioned at many points that amber is "too indulgent" of her unit members. she goes out of her way as much as she can to make things easier for them - she tells rafael and zak about the opening on beta team, she invites matias' teen level girlfriend to be part of their unit, she makes sure to specify that she wants nicole's new deputy to not have the team leader imprint so there's no risk of them challenging nicole's authority.

a good senior administrator would recognize that caring for the whole unit would be the best way to care for amber and keep her happy. because the happiness of her unit is one of amber's priorities.

obviously, there are times where she is thoughtful of others - like the way she emotionally supported emili after the fire in defender, and how she jumped in to help beckett after he was kicked out of keith's unit, and those have been the times where i as a reader and amber as the protag/narrator have liked megan the most. but those times are few and far between.

it's a stark contrast to the other team leaders. as hard as adika is on his strike team, he's very protective of them too (when they're discussing bringing new members into the unit, and he says that he's not accepting any of morton's men as temporary strike team members because it would be damaging to the self esteem of his greenies), and he's always sure to publicly praise them when they do something well.

and of course lucas's friendships with his tactical team members is very evident in the good-natured way he accepts ribbing from them, and even when buzz was annoyed at him for making forge blonde to infiltrate teen level during the whole blue upway thing, lucas accepts it all with good grace.

meanwhile, megan's relationship with amber and the rest of the unit keeps fraying, especially with buzz having to call her out during new year.

amber comes out of lottery as a telepath three years after her great-grandmother dies, and is bitterly disappointed that claire couldn't be there to hear the news. But also selfishly greatful that she'd gotten to know claire right up until her death, instead of being told she could never speak to her again

Amber going back to her childhood home and seeing all traces of her family erased and painted over

i want to write a one-shot where amber lets megan quit her position, and then amber gets assigned a new administrator who fits better for her. Since Amber has a close relationship with her parents, I think it would work a lot better if her senior administrator was more of an older sibling type figure rather than someone who's meant to fill a parental role. It won't make her feel defensive like someone is trying to replace her parents, but it still has a kind of mentorship/guidance tone for their dynamic so she'd be able to go to them for help and advice on things she can't go to her parents for.

She already has a younger brother, so it will be a familiar dynamic for her, and after being the older sibling all this time, it might be nice for her to be on the other side. I think it'd work especially well if the senior administrator tried to build a bond with Gregas too whenever he comes to the unit so they feel like more of a trio.

she keeps thinking "maybe i don't like megan because she's always trying to be my replacement mother figure" or "maybe i don't like megan because i subconsciously blame her for being the one that broke the news to me about being a telepath and i resent her as a symbol of my loss of a normal life"

prequels are always a bit hard for me to get into because i spend the first few chapters missing all our usual characters. but i do love the earth girl prequels, as well as all the other pre-canon-timeline books in the extended portal future, so i'm sure i'll enjoy this one too. i'm guessing it's set during the blue zone power outage? i've always been interested in learning more about that