Not much time to do it. She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia.
Welp. Suddenly they’ll all be like, “You’re working with the bad guys, aren’t you?”, and “You’re not taking my glory!”, or maybe “Why do you want to catch up with them?”
Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear.
Oh wait, I misread, she was doing that to the guy in her jeep (essentially stolen, like everything else she uses), not the guys in pursuit. I suppose there’s probably a shorter range on the manipulation, otherwise it’d be quite overpowered.
“Get the gun.”
She’ll make him shoot his own comrades.
He fished for it between the seats, picked it up.
Then he pointed the gun at her.
Well, apparently he’s still present enough to know who his target should be.
“No, stop,” she said. Too unspecific. Fuck. Still need to work on that. She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her.
I suppose this is her weakness, for now – until she gets better at it, the manipulated emotions will be a little too unspecific about certain things, such as whom to be paranoid about.
Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain. She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions. By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely.
This is why I call the music semi-metaphorical. I don’t think it actually manifests as sound that only the Newbie can hear and mentally “wrangle”, but when faced with a sense the brain isn’t normally designed to handle, it can find ways to treat these things as if they came from the basic senses. Similarly, I don’t think Dinah actually sees the branching timelines in any real sense, but because she has overview over a large number of them at once, presenting it as a “visual” in her mind is the best way for her brain to handle that sense.
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