He pulled the gun away, dropped it into his lap.  He crumpled over, his hands to his head, then moaned, “No.”

Is that a “no” of “no, I can’t shoot you”, or “no, please stop messing with my head”? Or maybe “no, this can’t be happening”?

She was close to her destination.  She pulled the jeep to a stop and hopped out, the other jeep pulling up just a ten or so yards away.  Two soldiers got out.

“Hey, fellas! How’d you like becoming my thralls along with your comrade? :)”

“Hey!” someone shouted at her.

She turned her back to them, slipping her ear buds in.  The music had looped back to the first track.

Looks like she doesn’t give a shit.

Also that’s a short playlist, how long have you been deleting stuff from it?

She got her phone out and skipped forward a few times, pausing to delete one song.  She sang along, “Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…”

Just like at the beginning of the chapter. This would make a fantastic bookend with that, but… this doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the end of the chapter.

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.

“I want to drive.  Switch seats with me.”

He nodded dumbly and climbed out of the jeep.  She made her way over to the driver’s seat, then waited for him to climb in before she peeled out.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess she doesn’t have a license.

The jeep cut through the shallow water that covered the roads.  Others had noticed her leaving, she knew, and were following in their own vehicle.

Hm? Are there other Slaughterhouse members around?

She could sense them, each a  fingerprint of emotions in deeply individual configurations.  The mix of personal pride and confidence that she sensed in them suggested they were military.  The soldiers that had been taking over for this guy?

Oh, okay. I suppose maybe he didn’t properly check out before getting enthralled. Or maybe they noticed the seat switch?

Hang on.

What’s one thing we know about parents and children with powers? Their powers are often similar.

And what’s one thing we know about Heartbreaker? He’s got lots of children.

I think we might have a half-sister of Alec here.

Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,
Nutty, screwy, mentally diseased…

Was I wrong earlier? Does this song, even with the line “Nutty, screwy, mad for me”, have anything to do with love?

Also it seems to have gone on for a while.

I’d question whether it was even really playing or if she was hearing the music from her own core, if not for the military guy commenting on the music.

Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it.  When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges.

Ahhh. Emotion manipulation. She might also be able to do things with the underlying personality.

With the way emotions are presented semi-metaphorically as music, maybe she can do something with actual music as well?

He screamed, throwing himself as far away from her as he could get, his weapon falling between the seats.

Yeeah, that would do it.

This particular usage of the power seems a lot like Gallant’s emotion blasts or Glory Girl’s angelic aura of fear and respect, but more versatile. Heartbreaker also comes to mind, especially if she can reach deeper and manipulate his underlying personality.

“You pointed at yourself twice, skipped the wild-looking one with clothes, and said you keep forgetting your own name. Are you sure you’re okay?”