"Let's first start with what you know," the Minbari said casually, not expecting too much.
Rally Vincent's silence was intimidating to say the least, but she still wasn't a telepath and she was human besides.
"Know about what, Mr. Dhaliri?" Vivian asked.
"About the use of your gifts, of course," the Minbari said with an arched brow. "And you do not need to refer to me by this human title of 'Mister'."
"All right," Vivian said, uncertainly.
"I burn things," Shanti said simply, looking up from a mirror before looking back down and checking her make-up. "I don't think it gets much simpler than that."
Dhaliri reached over and took the mirror out of her hand and set it aside as Vivi rolled her eyes.
"And what about your sister," he asked, looking over towards Vivi.
"I can get visions off of objects," Vivian said, uncomfortably. "Gloves help, but if there's a lot then I still feel it. And the strong memories last a long time."
"What has your mother done up to now to help you deal with it?" the Minbari asked, nodding as he considered that neither gift was something he had heard about outside of perhaps the Vorlons.
"Well," Shanti said. "She made us practice a lot. So I know what it feels like and what happens when I do stuff. I get really thirsty and my head hurts a lot when I do that though, so I'd really rather just have a gun."
"Of course you would," Dhaliri said. "I imagine you have your own weapon already."
"No," Shanti said irritably. "Rally only lets us use firearms on the targeting range and sometimes she makes us clean them."
"So, you've only had practical trial and error practice?" the Minbari reasoned. That was a bit more than he'd expected really. "Anything at all like meditation."
"We learn awareness, focus," Vivian said, counting it off, "and visualization."
"Can you say a little bit more about that?" Dhaliri asked, idly curious.
"Well, first you have to know what's going on around you," Shanti said. "Then know what to focus on, and visualize what you want to happen."
"And focus without ignoring anything," Vivian said.
"Yeah, I always forget that part," Shanti said, shrugging. "Oh yeah, and dreaming."
"What is that?" Dhaliri said.
"Lucid dreaming," Vivian said. "Rally said we need to be able to recognize what a dream feels like and to control what happens during it."
"That's fun," Shanti said eagerly. "Rally says to give the dream what it wants but put what you want underneath it so it doesn't take you somewhere you don't want to go. But I just like to have fun and imagine great fight scenes or really pretty dresses or something. Burning stuff is a lot easier when I'm dreaming."
Dhaliri swallowed a bit nervously.
"How often do you practice this?" he wondered.
"Every night," Vivian said.
"The boring part is getting ready to go to sleep and just breathing for fifteen minutes," Shanti said. "Then we're asleep and the fun part is when the dreams start."
"Did she tell you why?" Dhaliri asked.
"Because a telepath or drugs can make you see things or feel things that aren't real," Vivian said. "And Rally said that dreaming is the closest thing to that feeling she can think of. So she makes us practice against our dreams."
"And your mother does this too?" Dhaliri asked.
"I don't think Rally even really sleeps much," Shanti said.
"She sleeps," Vivian said. "She just doesn't...turn off. Her alarm is a red light about this big."
She pinched her thumb and index finger together less than an inch.
"That wakes her up if she's facing it," the short-haired twin said.
The woman had been teaching her children defense techniques against telepathic intrusion. And if he had to guess from the description, how to undermine manipulation while making the invader feel that they had succeeded at whatever they were attempting.
That was rather intimidating. He'd run across one other silent person before, and that was the result of acute mental trauma, but the individual hadn't spent anytime afterwards developing the condition. Now that he thought about it, Vivian and Shanti were both quieter, though not silent, than most, though Shanti had brief spikes of mental volume. He had just considered it part of their gift.
Given Vivian's ability that might be the case with her, but he wondered if it was as much their mother's upbringing that had to do with it.
"Now, what I want," he said. "Is for you to use your abilities while I listen to see what is happening with your abilities."
Rally was starting to learn her way around Down Below given how often she had business down here recently. At the moment, she was poking around the area that she had found the first grenade launcher.
It had been in a pile of refuse probably scavenged from who knows where and nobody in the area seemed to know who had brought the debris to that area.
None of the arms merchants had heard of any new players in the black market, and none of them claimed to be behind this.
However, Rally wouldn't be surprised if she discovered that one of them had stumbled upon the launchers by accident and tried to get rid of them. Resulting in them scattered all over the place.
She grimaced visually at that. Such a hopeful guess wouldn't explain why the launchers were being found loaded with armed grenades.
At the moment, she was picking through the debris a second time, keeping in mind where it all would come from. But, as she picked through it a second time now, she was coming to the same conclusion that she knew she would.
The debris of this pile didn't match the debris of the pile where the other arms dealer had found the second launcher.
If a rogue, lost shipment of weapons had been found and were getting scattered about by accident, then she'd expect to find something in common between the debris other than just the weapons.
It made the chance they were being deliberately seeded just that much more dangerous.
Looking up and around, Rally couldn't see any other piles of debris in the immediate area. She glanced around toward one of the people looking toward her cautiously and walked over, pulling out a small credit chit with a casual attitude.
She maintained a number of small accounts with a set number of credits which had orders to close as soon as they were first emptied. It let her bribe or otherwise pay people that didn't have accents to transfer money to.
"Can someone tell me what these debris piles are here for?" she asked.
A mousy woman eyed the credit chit and then the debris pile.
"It's out of the way there," she said. "It's the stuff that gets put aside after someone builds a wall or takes one down."
Rally nodded and looked around again before turning back to the woman.
"Are there set places to put these things?" she asked.
"Th..there are a few big dumping places," the woman said, eyes on the chit.
"Show me," Rally said.
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(Posted Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:00)
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