Let’s see if we can’t find out what the Newbie actually calls herself today. At least one of her names would be nice. 😛

“Hey!”

She could sense her passenger climbing out of the jeep, hear the garbled murmurs of warning, questions.

“What are you doing, man?”

There was a burst of fear from all three, then the sound of multiple guns firing.  She smiled.

Welp, looks like the suspicion, tension and paranoia just kicked in.

The authorities would have a hell of a time figuring out what happened there.

Yeeeah, especially since it seems likely they don’t know about the Newbie being in the Slaughterhouse yet.

…so let’s read some more Worm!

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?