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It was a hell of a morning in the Arlington PD.
“Two dead. One butchered beyond recognition, looks like somebody ran afoul of void entities. A second less than a mile away, crushed with a fucking merry-go-round that we found embedded in a brick wall behind her.”
“Fuckin’ warps.”
“Fuckin’ kid warps. A fuckin’ kid did this. Don’t even know how old she is.”
“If she’s younger than 13 then she’s one hell of a prodigy.”
“I saw her. She could pass for 10.”
“No fuckin’ way. Dr. Wesson has his hands full.”
“That pussy Wesson deals with victims. This girl is a fucking killer.”
“Witnesses on the scene say it’s self defense. The victim was a warp user too apparently. Cold Powers. It’s 60 degrees out today and the investigators had to break out their winter gear at the crime scene. A couple of kids are being treated for frostbite.”
“What? Was there a tiff on the playground that ended in murder?”
“Apparently the victim was an adult. We don’t know anything else yet. Gotta wait for the investigators to finish digging.”
“So we’re looking at a pre-teen warper murderer who took out an adult warper with a fucking merry-go-round and she’s talking to that pussy Wesson?”
“Jesus Christ dude…”
********
Omnipotence didn’t have a word to describe the room she found herself in. But she felt comfortable there. The colors were bright, the chairs were soft and it had a lot of…soft things. Animals, but not real animals. Made of felt. She felt the inexplicable compulsion to touch one but she didn’t know if she was allowed. She still felt naked though. And cold. So cold. She needed to get warm. And she needed sleeves. Why didn’t they listen? She tried explaining but they didn’t listen. They never listened. That was her job.
As she was pondering her surroundings a man came through the door. Not a man she recognized. But she didn’t recognize many people. Aside from Mother and Father. And her doctor. This man was somewhat rotund and he didn’t have as much hair on his head as Mother and Father did. Omnipotence wondered what he was going to tell her to do. She couldn’t do much. Not without sleeves. No, that’s not true. She did plenty without sleeves. This morning anyway. Not last night. She could have saved him. If she had sleeves.
“Hello young lady.” The man’s voice sounded different than her parents' voice. He sounded like somebody she wanted to hear talk. Not like Mother and Father. “My name is Tim. What’s your name?” Dr. Timothy Wesson was debriefed on the situation before meeting with Omnipotence, but the debriefing didn’t include her name. When he inquired the police said they didn’t know. All the information Dr. Wesson had led him to the conclusion that this was not going to be easy. All he knew is that this was still a child and he would approach her with the kindness and understanding he had approached all the children he had worked with.
“Omnipotence.” Her heart began racing in her chest. Aside from brief exchanges with cops at the scene she had never had a conversation with a person other than her mother and father and her doctor.
Only one word had escaped his newest patient’s lips and Dr Wesson already knew he was in for a long day.
“Omnipotence? That’s a pretty name.” Dr Wesson lied. That name wasn’t pretty at all. That’s the sort of name somebody demented would name their child. “Are you ok? Do you need anything?”
“I’m cold.” Omnipotence said, trying ineffectually to hug herself for warmth. She felt warmer than she did at the scene but not warm enough. “I need sleeves.”
Dr. Wesson moved towards his supply closet.” I have a blanket here. Do you have any warmer clothes at your house?
“Pajamas” All of Omnipotence’s clothing were either simple sundresses like the yellow one she was currently wearing or pajamas. But the sleeves on the pajamas were too tight. She needed looser sleeves.
“No sweaters or jackets?” Dr. Wesson said as he draped the blanket over Omnipotence’s shoulders. The blanket helped. It felt warm.
“Only mother and father wore them. They said I didn’t need them because I never went outside. Until last night.”
Several red flags popped up in Dr. Wesson’s mind.
“Why did you go outside?”
“The night hunt.” Dr. Wesson was shocked that apparently the only time this girl had left her house was to fight void entities. “I needed sleeves. Long sleeves, loose sleeves. But they didn’t listen. And now he’s dead.” Omniscience did not say the word dead with any inflection or sign of remorse. She still wasn’t sure whether or not it was a bad thing.
“He?” Dr. Wesson was concerned. The only victim he was told about was a woman. Did this girl kill two people?
“Who died? Who was he?”
“My father. Last night. Void entities got him. I tried to help but I couldn’t. We were in a field. There was nothing for me to use. And I didn’t have sleeves.”
Dr. Wesson could tell Omnipotence was getting increasingly agitated about not having sleeves so he removed his long-sleeved coat. He wanted to provide her the relief of giving her what she clearly needed.. But then he remembered he was dealing with a warper whose grasp on the world around her was tenuous and despite being a child, was still demonstrably dangerous.
“Omnipotence. If I give you this coat. What will you do with the sleeves?”
“I have tricks up there. I know it. I can feel it.” Warper intuition. A warper slowly comes to the realization of how their powers work as they grow, fully culminating usually at the advent of puberty. Sometimes later.
“Will those tricks hurt people?”
“If I want them to.”
“Do you want to hurt anybody?”
“No.”
“What will you do with those tricks if you access them?”
“Nothing right now. I just feel scared right now. I feel vulnerable.”
“Nobody is here to scare you or hurt you. I promise.” Dr. Wesson was glad they opted to not interrogate this girl. She would crack and it could very well become everybody’s problem. This girl needed a delicate touch.
“I don’t believe you.” Omniscience was blunt. She had no experience with people who weren’t trying to scare her or hurt her. That was normal.
“You don’t feel safe here?”
“I don’t feel safe anywhere.” Omniscience was conflicted. She was often hurt by the treatment of her mother and father but for years she simply rationalized their treatment as a necessary process for her to become the vessel. Beyond that she saw it as normal because she didn’t know anything else. But then she didn’t become the vessel. At least she didn’t think she did. If she was the vessel she wasn’t much of one. But even with the process over her treatment didn’t get better. It got worse.
Dr Wesson was conflicted. Despite her reported actions, Omnipotence seemed harmless. She reportedly acted in defense of herself and others and was taken into police custody without issue. Whatever befell her this morning made her feel vulnerable to the point where her safety was becoming a fixation. If her obsession with sleeves grew any larger the interview might have to be prematurely ended. So he opted to rely on his professional intuition.
“Omnipotence, if I give you my jacket will you promise to not use your warp to hurt anybody?”
“Ok.” Omnipotence wasn’t sure she could keep that promise but she wanted the sleeves too badly to say no.
Wesson handed his jacket to Omnipotence, who threw off her blanket to put it on. It was obviously a terrible fit. Dr Wesson was a 2XL and Omnipotence was likely a ‘small’. She buttoned it simply to keep it on her shoulders. Once it was secured she took her right hand and plunged it into the left sleeve. A moment later Wesson was astonished as the girl pulled a wrench out of her sleeve.
“Is that the trick up your sleeve?” Wesson said, picking up the blanket back up and re-covering her with it. He wasn’t sure how pulling wrenches out of sleeves made Omniscience feel safe but it wasn’t his warp.
“One of them.” The girl replied. “I have a bunch of stuff up there. Chains, golf clubs, crowbars, yo-yos…a bunch of random stuff.”
“How does any of that keep you safe?”
“Like this.” As Omnipotence replied the wrench glowed with a lavender light. “I put power into the objects and they get powerful and I can fight with them.” Just like that the lavender light vanished. “But I’m not fighting right now. I can do it with other objects too but there wasn’t anything I could use last night. That’s why I needed sleeves, so I can always have something to fight with. But they didn’t listen. They didn’t care. And then he died.”
“So what exactly happened?” Wesson didn’t want to ask, but it was part of the job.
“I finally figured out how to fully manifest my powers. I drove a pencil through my desk.” Wanna see?” The child, who had mostly been either impassive or anxious the entire meeting seemed excited as she reached over to the Doctor’s desk and grabbed a pencil from his pen cup.
“Please don’t.” He didn’t want to discourage her excitement but he couldn’t encourage her to perform an act that amounted to vandalism.
“Ok.” Omnipotence sounded disappointed as she put the pencil back. “Do you still want to hear the story?”
“Yes please.”
“My mother and father were very angry at me. They were expecting something far more powerful. I cried. I apologized. But they didn’t care. Mother scolded me. Father scolded me, then scolded her, then stormed off. Then they started yelling in their bedroom. That was 2 nights ago.”
This story was quickly becoming a red flag rally. Expecting something more powerful? What made them think that? It was true that exceptionally powerful warpers could manifest earlier in life and grow stronger but Omnipotence just told him she just started to fully manifest.
“What did he yell at your mother about?”
“He said swears. Will you get mad if I say them?”
“No I won’t.”
The words were engraved in Omnipotence’s heart and she recited them verbatim.
“Fucking hell Sheila! 13 fucking years for her to wind up a dud! You want to waste your life with this bullshit fine, but I’m fucking out!” Omnipotence raised her voice to match his tone.
Dr. Wesson was able to finally glean her age and the first name of her mother from this information. He couldn’t figure out the rest.
“Do you know why your father would call you a dud?”
“I don’t know what that word means.” The way she said it told Dr. Wesson that Omnipotence still knew it was a bad word.
“So what happened after that?”
“They ignored me after that. For almost the entire next day. Until the night when I said a bad thing.”
“What bad thing did you say?”
“I begged them to give me sleeves and let me patrol.”
“Why did you want to patrol? Did you just want to go outside?”
“No. I’m supposed to defeat the void entities! It’s the whole reason I exist!” Omnipotence’s voice was pleading, begging to be understood.
“Did your mother and father tell you that?”
“All the time. I was supposed to be the vessel. The shell who would receive God’s greatest blessing and begin the second coming. All the void entities would die and mankind would enter the promised age of Heaven on Earth.”
Dr Wesson knew that such a judgment was both uncharacteristic of him and unproductive as a behavioral health professional but in that moment he thought that might have been the craziest thing he ever heard somebody say in complete sincerity.
“That seems like a lot of responsibility for somebody so young.”
“What does my age have to do with it?”
“Big things like saving the world are usually tasks given to adults. Children like you are supposed to learn, grow up, play, make friends. That kind of thing.”
“Mother told me the only thing worth learning was the holy word. So that was what she taught me. She told me that other kinds of knowledge would corrupt me and make me an unsuitable vessel.”
“What about friends?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Other people. Ideally your age. That you form bonds with.”
Omnipotence remembered things like that from her studies. “Mother said that others are dirty sinners from a broken world and being exposed to them would corrupt me and make me an unsuitable vessel.”
“Do you think I’m a dirty sinner?”
“Mother and Father said so long as I followed their orders faithfully I would become the vessel and ignite the second coming. But it didn’t happen. I thought I failed but I did everything right. So maybe they failed. I don’t know anymore. I just know they’re gone.”
“What happened to your father?”
“They let me patrol. But they wouldn't give me any of their sleeves. Father went with me. Told Mother he needed to ‘let off some steam’ and ‘somebody needed to make sure I didn’t get killed out there.’ So we went out. He walked really quickly, I had never been outside before. It was so overwhelming. It was so hard to take it all in. But he was rushing and kept yelling at me to keep up. I should have grabbed something to use as a weapon but I was too worried about what he’d do if I stopped. We walked for a while and entered a field. I think it was called a park or something. It was all lit up. But the field had nothing in it. Nothing I could use. I couldn’t actually fight but I didn’t want to go back and get something because I was afraid of how my dad would respond. So he just did everything himself. The void entities didn’t really look like what I was told void entities looked like. They were just dark spheres. My father ran through them. He would vanish then appear on the other side of them, there was a flash of blue light then boom! The entity was destroyed.”
Wesson gauged that what Omnipotence was describing was her father’s warp. The cops had mentioned that they didn’t have an ID for her parents so that could possibly help.
“Go on.”
“He just kept doing that. But one time he did it but one of the entities was right behind the one he went through. He wound up inside the darkness part. I thought he’d just burst out but he didn’t. He started screaming. I looked for something to help him. Nothing on the ground. No rocks. I tried grabbing a clump of dirt out of the ground but the ground was too hard. And then the screaming stopped. He was gone. And the darkness was coming for me. I ran. I ran until I found something to hit them with. It was a bench.”
“You picked up a park bench?”
“I can pick things up when they’re empowered. It doesn’t matter how heavy they are.”
“You weren’t scared.”
“My purpose is to destroy the void entities. I’m not scared of them. Not when I have the ability to destroy them. I didn’t before.They were all starting to…group up I guess. I swung the…bench. A bunch went flying. I kept doing that. They just kept walking into it. Soon they were all gone. I went back to look for Father. But there was just a gross mess where he used to be. He was dead.” Omnipotence sounded sad, but not in a mournful way.
“Are you sad he’s gone?”
“I don’t know. I was scared though. Mother would be mad. I just kinda stayed there in the park until I got too tired. Then I went back. Because I knew not to sleep outside. I went back to my bed and I tried to sleep. I didn’t sleep much. Or maybe I did. I woke up to Mother yelling at me. She never used to raise her voice. But now it was practically all she did. She was yelling at me. Demanding to know where Father was. I had to tell her he was dead. Then she got really mad. So mad it started getting really cold. She was yelling as loud as she could, blaming me for Father’s death. She reached for me but I knew if I let her grab me she was going to hurt me badly. So I ran. She followed. It started getting colder. Really cold. It was really painful. I ran to a place where there were other children and a few more adults. The children were younger than me I think. But the cold followed me. And it reached them. I could see the kids freezing. They were hurting. Worse than me. The parents started screaming. I stopped running. I yelled at my mom to stop because she was hurting children. She was a small ways away from me but I saw something in her eyes. She looked like she was ready to hurt everybody. And then snow started swirling around. And the wind picked up. It was getting colder. She reached her arm out. I had to stop her. So I grabbed this…big metal spinny thing the kids were playing on. I empowered it and I ripped it right out of the ground. I held it in front of me. It was so cold. I could feel the snow and wind get really strong but the metal thing blocked most of it. Then I felt it let up slightly. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I threw it at her. After it left my hands I saw a big block of ice blocking the path between the metal thing and Mother. I thought it would block the metal thing. But it didn’t. It shattered the ice. And then it hit Mother. And then it kept going…And just like that she was dead.”
Wesson couldn’t even bring himself to interject as this child calmly told the story of how she killed her mother in defense of herself and in defense of several others.
“Are you ok?” It was the only thing Wesson could think to ask.
“I feel ok now I have sleeves.”
“I mean about both your Mother and Father being gone forever.”
“They’ll be in Heaven I think. They hurt me and they failed but they still tried to save the world.”
“And what about you?”
Omnipotence looked downwards. Her confusion about the day’s events turned into sadness.
“I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything. I was prepared to be a vessel and now I’m not and now I don’t know anything.”
“Well I need you to know we’re here to help you continue your life. I will do everything in my power to make sure you will be able to live a normal life from here on out. As a human being. Not a vessel.”
“I don’t know what that means. But I guess I have to.”
“We’ll figure that out together. Do you have any relatives that you know of? Grandparents? Uncles? Aunts?”
Wesson felt like he knew the answer to this.
“Not that I know of. I only know of Mother and Father and the Doctor.”
This ‘Doctor’ made another appearance in Omnipotence’s words. Wesson felt it was finally time to ask an important question.
“How did you see a doctor if you never left your apartment?”
“He came to us. Is that not normal?”
“No. Usually people go to the Doctor. Do you know the name of your Doctor?”
“No. I only ever called him ‘Doctor’.”
Wesson made a note of this. This doctor was clearly an accessory to Omnipotence’s abuse and might be able to provide answers if he’s found. But that wasn’t for him to personally investigate.
“Alright Omnipotence. That’s all the questions for now. Now just relax. I have to talk with some other adults. I have some toys on the floor if you care to play with them.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you’re not studying or working. It’s something you do to feel happy. Let me show you.” Wesson knew the toys on the floor were for kids younger than Omnipotence but he also knew that Omnipotence’s maturity level could not be tied to her age. She had likely never experienced toys before so just the experience of doing something for the sake of being happy, it didn’t matter who the toys were for. So Wesson showed Omnipotence the idea of ‘play’.
“I don’t quite get it. But what about these?” Omnipotence grabbed a plush bear from the pile. “Can I play with these?”
“Sure. They’re also really soft. If you hug them they might help you feel better.”
“Ok.” Omnipotence knew what a hug was in theory so she did it to the small plush bear. She didn’t understand what she was feeling. She felt warm, but not ‘temperature’ warm. She felt like crying but not because she was sad or scared. Tears escaped her eyes as she clutched the bear harder. “I like this. Am I doing it right? Can I keep doing it?”
“Sure you can. As long as you have to.” Wesson left the office with Omnipotence on the floor, wearing his jacket, covered in a blanket, holding a stuffed bear in a deathgrip.
*******
“Do you have anything for us?”
“First and foremost she’s going to need a full neuropsych eval. I’m going to be calling several social service providers to set her up with a basic wellness net.”
“What about the case.”
“Very well. The girl said the corpse you mentioned in the park belongs to her father.”
“She kill him too?”
“No. According to her he was the victim of void entities.”
"Could she be lying?"
"I don't think she even knows how."
“Any names on the father or mother?”
“Not for the father. She said the father called the mother ‘Sheila’. Their MO seemed to be religious zealotry. They had trapped the poor girl in their apartment for her entire life until last night. They even had a doctor visit her. Apparently their goal was to make the second coming of Jesus Christ by isolating her from everything and everybody.”
“How the hell would that make her Jesus Christ?”
“I think it had something to do with giving her special void powers. She had recently awoken to her void powers and they were very upset about them. Like they were expecting something else. She kept mentioning something about being a vessel.”
“Some of this is starting to sound a little familiar. The whole idea of waiting for some second coming to rid the world of the void entities sounds like the MO of the Church of the Radiant Tomorrow.”
“So this was a couple of Radiant Tomorrow loons? Christ. I’ve heard some horror stories but this is just…shit.”
"This ‘Sheila's’ cold powers seem like they would put her on the government’s Exceptional Warp User list if they’re powerful enough to lower the temperature of an area for hours on end. We’ll have to cross reference.”
“Also they had a doctor making house calls. Those aren't fancy apartments. They were getting support from somewhere, likely somewhere in the organization. We gotta follow the money and see if we can get anything on this doctor. Anything else?”
“Is she competent to stand trial? She might be a minor and she has a case for self defense but this is still a criminal matter.”
“She is absolutely not competent to stand trial. She is intelligent but in terms of social integration and general education she knows practically nothing. She has a long road to travel before she can fit into society in any real sense. Any criminal proceedings here are out of my hands and I’ve told you all she told me so I will be on my way. I have calls to make and a very traumatized child to reassure.”
Meanwhile alone in an office sat a child holding a wrench, desperately clinging to a fuzzy stuffed bear, the first thing to ever give her comfort. She was in a world she barely understood. Experiencing things she wasn't meant to deal with and taking the first steps to something her Mother and Father thought she'd never be. Today she was a warrior, a hero and a killer but that was the easy part. The difficult part would start when Dr Wesson walked back into that office and started her on her first painful steps towards becoming a person.