Paranormal fights reported across the world
Reports have been trickling in from across the globe about fights involving super-human abilities. Governments are struggling to address the situation while their representatives discuss it at an emergency United Nations session.
We were one of the lucky cities. Preacher Markham’s sermon was the only deliberate violence we saw as people’s abilities became apparent. He spent a few days at the hospital recovering; the officer outside his door had a bucket of water and a Super Soaker in addition to his normal gear. When he recovered, physically that is, he was escorted to the town line in his car and reminded that Preacher Anderson’s decision not to press charges was conditional on him never returning to our town.
After the fire had been handled, I was one of several people who provided statements to the police. My statement detailed what we all saw and heard, and reminded the officer that our church is unquestionably a no cell phone zone. Preacher Anderson is steadfast in her belief that cell phones play no meaningful part in our worship and must remain at home or in the car. At the time, nobody in town had manifested any telepathic abilities, much less over a distance, so my run to the station was appreciated.
When our fight came, it was political. While the world governments debated a course of action, Papa and the mayor scheduled an emergency city meeting with three days notice. Everybody in town was invited, so it was held at City Park instead of trying to squeeze everybody into one building or another. Fortunately, the weather cooperated.
By that point, I had told Papa what I left out of my official statement, how I heard extra meaning to what the preacher had said. We decided that I would sit near the front at the city meeting and listen to everybody who spoke. I took notes and would nod or shake my head so Papa could see whether they meant what they were saying. By the end of the night, Papa and Mayor Bramley had the city convinced that we needed to work with these abilities as Gifts and adjust our day-to-day behavior to include them. We even adjusted our class schedules at school to include practice time for anybody who needed it for their Gifts. It took the nearby college campus a bit longer to do that, which may be what caused some of our other problems. But I’ll get to that shortly.
This was all at the local level, of course. The state government waffled, and then let the federal government start a registration process for Gifts. Papa and the mayor fought that all the way up to the Supreme Court. They won in the end, though a few years after the Registration Rules were passed, with the registration process being declared unconstitutional. It helped, of course, that half the justices were known to have special abilities; some of the others may have had more subtle ones, like mine.
Our peaceful existence was rare; many cities had fighting not just because of the gifted, but between people who sought any excuse to fight. The police couldn’t keep up in the bigger cities, and people started fleeing to what they called the ‘more rustic’ living. As if their cell phones and internet access didn’t work here just as well. When new people moved into town, Papa and I would welcome them with a plate of Aunt Mary’s cookies and a conversation. Papa didn’t really care if people lied about why they moved to town, as long as they had good intentions, so mostly they settled in happily.
And then the monsters arrived.
