"Kaa-chan and Jane nee-chan will talk to you during the Parent-Teacher conferences. Nobody will be able to see or hear you."
Then Kimiko ran out of the room, spun in mid-air as she bounced off the wall opposite, and pelted down the hall so she could catch up with her friends. She didn't want to miss the lunchtime gossip session!
<
The first day there was one boy who was, almost, troublesome. Fortunately 9 year old boys are just on the verge of finding girls interesting. You know the drill. They tend to act weird toward a girl who attracts them because they really have no concept of proper behavior yet.
Well, what happened is this. At lunch that day Kumiko brought out her Japanese style lunch box. (They call them bento boxes.) As she was unwrapping it one of the bigger boys reached out and grabbed it and started to pull it away from Kumiko. Or that's what he thought he was going to do.
She reached up and grabbed his wrist. At that point he wasn't moving any more. You remember how strong she is, right? She didn't do anything to him, she just held him still no matter how hard he tugged.
Finally he let go of the bento box, and she let go of him. At that point they had quite an audience. She typed out a message for him. "Polite people ask permission."
Then he said: "Can I see that? What is it?"
Kumiko's response was more than predictable. "You should have said: 'May I see that?', but your intent is understood. This is the kind of lunch box that we have in Japan. And, yes, you may see it, but do not touch it."
Then she smiled at him. I know that Jane's smile will draw every eye within 50 feet, but Kumiko's is almost as dazzling. She was suddenly surrounded by kids wanting to talk to her.
She's been friends with most of the girls ever since. That was the end of our concern about bullying. Nobody is going to be stupid enough to try to bully one of the most popular kids in school.
Kimiko went the other way. When she demonstrated a few of her minor acrobatic skills, she was in instantly with the boys. The girls consider her to be a show-off tomboy, but she doesn't care. She likes hanging out with the guys, playing ball, stuff like that.
So, both girls are doing quite well on the social end, just in different ways, and both are totally safe. Unfortunately it's only from the other kids.
Otherwise, well, we still don't know quite what is going on.
Jane's FBI and Air Force contacts (ie, the Forsythes) are pretty much stone-walling her. She's not finding out anything worthwhile through her hacker network either. Just a bunch of rumors about "android assassins" and "alien inflitrators who can ape human appearance and are killing random people." In other words, nothing more than we knew already. Even the National Enquirer isn't helpful.
Damn it, it worked in Men In Black. I thought that it was at least worth a try.
Hey! No hitting! You watchers are all the same. Why do you keep hitting me?
What? Who's insufferable?
No, I don't like you. Forgive you? Well, maybe if you get me some really GOOD chocolate chip cookies.
OW!!!!>>
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The nerve of that woman. Trying to get ME to play with her like some common Watcher. She really is insufferable.
The Observer shook himself to properly arrange his feathers and settled down to meditate. He didn't require all his attention to watch, that's why he had been promoted to Observer. It was an important distinction. It showed that he was a being "on the way up." Not that he intended to let it go to his head.
He'd noticed over the past few centuries that those who had an inflated sense of self-importance tended to end up in dead-end jobs, at least until their attitudes improved. That was something he intended to avoid at all costs.
He paused a moment to consider the incongruity. You might think that time didn't mean all that much to beings with their lifespans, but don't fool yourself. The longer lived you are, the more precious time becomes.
(There's no way to explain it further. It's one of the rules. A hint? I can do that. Study Daoism, especially the meaning of the Dao. Nope, I can't say any more than that.)
OK. Attention divided two ways he could manage. Three was a bit much. Back to business. Fortunately nothing had happ.....
"OH SHIT!" The small part of his mind that wasn't in a total panic was thinking about how useful that phrase was.
"Erelah, get Grgur back here, RIGHT NOW!"
"Yes, I know that it's on vacation. Get it! I don't care what moon it's visiting. Tell it that its ass will be in a grinder if its not here immediately. Not two days, not 12 hours. Four hours, tops. And if it's not here by then, your tail end will be ground meat too. MOVE IT!"
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The Observer trembled with trepidation. He'd have been amused by the phrase if only he was hearing it and not feeling it. Experiencing it took all the fun out of the alliteration. Right at the edges of his awareness, just barely enough to trip his internal alarm, there was a disturbance, and it was becoming very clear that he wasn't mistaken. It was a very familiar disturbance. SHE was down there.
No, not the one that the humans were calling "The Lady." That one was all about subtlety. THIS one was all about sledgehammers and explosions. Wherever she went, disaster followed. And she was heading directly toward the Knight family.
"Calm, I must be calm. I might wish that this hadn't happened on my watch, but it did, so I must be calm. I have to be logical. I have to reason out what to do."
But nobody in the past 40 millennia had figured out what to do about HER.
"Oh Lord. Whatever can I do?" He wailed like a newborn, a sound of total despair.
Well, what would you do when a physical manifestation of Kali, suddenly showed up at your worksite? Would you just sit there and hope that what she'd come to destroy wasn't you, or would you run away in terror? The Observer was much braver than most beings would think possible for an avian herbivore. What did he do? Why, he grabbed the edges of his desk and held on for dear life.
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As she drove closer, she felt the disturbance in the aether that was caused by the Observer's panic. She sighed. She'd have to report him. She didn't like doing things like that, but he was broadcasting his presence, and who knew what might pick it up and home in on it. There were enough problems already.
But wasn't she one who reveled in chaos? No, contrary to her reputation, she really wasn't one of those who enjoyed death and destruction. That was just bad press. The stupid humans always had to blame someone else for the problems that they caused. Those wusses. Too cowardly to accept that they caused most of their own problems, just like this one.
So she was called Kali, Goddess of Death and Destruction. And those depictions of her wearing a necklace of skulls... Gross! Those Thuggee who claimed to serve her were nothing but an abomination. Not to her taste at all. She much preferred listening to classical music and sipping a good Barsac after dinner.
Far too few remembered her origins and her original purpose. As the spouse of Shiva she was the protector, the destroyer of evil, the slayer of demons, and the one who stands outside of time.
Oh well. She had work to do if the project was going to succeed, so she'd best be about it.
When she got to about 1/2 mile from the Knight home she spotted something watching her from the top of a tree a few hundred yards away. She almost obliterated it, but then noticed that it was one of the twin girls she'd been briefed about. Right after that, she noticed the two other beings that were watching the child. They were hunkered down at the base of the tree she was in, obviously hoping that she'd come down where they could get at her.
Kali made a mental note to talk to someone about basic precautions. Those electronic surveillance gadgets worked fine against mortals, but these were another thing entirely.
She supposed that she should do this with finesse rather than brute force. Her reputation was bad enough already.
Sighing deeply at the loss of time, she pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and concentrated. One thing she did believe in was that if you did something at all, you should do it to excess. She had read the briefing report on Karla with particular interest. There was a being who had the right attitude!
Well, this was going to be very big, but also very subtle. And it was definitely going to be fun!
First she imaged an energy dome 20 kilometers across and centered it on her current position. It was easier that way, and any being that decided to investigate it later on might be misled for a while by the center being offset from the Knight's place. An extra diversion never hurt.
Then she anchored the edges at ground level. Given that the elevation varied by almost 200 meters all around the perimeter, that took a while. Finally, once the anchor was firm, she slowly contracted the dome until it literally coated every object above ground like a second skin. That's right, every leaf, blade of grass, building, you get the idea. Very tedious work. It took her approximately 2.7 minutes.
Now what she had to do was make it self-sustaining. She could let it draw from her personal energies, but that would be a constant irritant, very like a mosquito buzzing in your ear. It was too bad that "ley lines" were mythological. She might have been able to use them if they really existed.
She had it! She pushed her consciousness down into the rock where the Juan de Fuca Plate was subducting under the Pacific Northwest part of the North American Plate. There ought to be one somewhere....
Ah, there. A magma pool that was slowly cooling and had no chance of erupting if she changed the energy balance. She attached the edges of her field to the surface of the magma in such a way that it would use the heat of the magma to power itself. There, done!
The energy drain from her work would speed the cooling of the magma moderately, and it might trigger a slow earthquake in the future, and maybe, just maybe, it might speed up the "big one" that was going to hit the coast, but it wouldn't be any stronger because of her meddling, probably, and it was going to happen eventually all by itself. She'd just sped it up a little bit, that's all. Just that. Nothing more. Really!
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I know that you've been holding your breath due to the excitement. What was this energy field supposed to do? Just one thing. Any non-human being of hostile intent would cease to exist the moment it touched it.
Yes, that's right. Kimiko was no longer in danger from the beings who had been following her. They were now just some dust filtering down onto the ground. They should make good fertilizer though.
<
To make it bigger requires more energy. That's obvious. The question here though is this: How much more? The 10 kilometer radius wasn't a random choice. It gave the family protection at school and all the way to downtown Salem, which was rather important.
Why? That's another question, but, I'll answer it anyway. The reason she did that was because of shopping. Kali happens to like high quality clothes, and there's a rather nice Nordstrom's store in downtown Salem. I'm not saying that that's definitely the reason, but it does make sense from her rather warped point of view.
No, wait! I didn't say that! Really I didn't! If you mention it to anyone and it gets around, she'll hunt me down. But not before I hunt you down. You get me? I thought you would.
Getting back to the reason for the size. More energy and all that, as I mentioned above. The problem is that the energy requirement grows exponentially. So, for instance, if she'd made it 90 km across, to cover Portland as well, she'd need a LOT more energy.
What she'd have to do for that was to go a lot deeper. Maybe tap the mantle for the power. Maybe cause a repeat of the Siberian Traps. If you don't know what they were, just imagine lava flows well over a thousand feet deep and with the eruption lasting close to a million years.
Yes. I said a MILLION years.
Good thinking. Larger isn't always better. Finesse in all thing, well usually. Sometimes a hammer is required to get the job done, but not this time.
No more questions I assume? Good. Getting back to Kali now.>>