Hard Work and Stuff (Karalie)

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    Miles had set up two chairs in the middle of his training room; one for himself, one for his new student.  He flipped through her file as he waited to meet her in person for the first time. Karalie Heise. Seventeen. Retrocognition. According to notes from her previous trainer, she exhibited exemplary control when calm, but lost some of that stability during periods of heightened emotion.   Well, I would not call that control at all.  More like temporary good luck.

    Miles closed the file, set it on the ground, and picked up his cup of coffee. He remembered his own training; the years training, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the hunger to improve. He remembered being mocked by mentor after mentor because of his emotional weakness. It had taken him decades to master keeping his powers under control during his periods of...emotional duress.  He understood how to handle something like this.  Maybe this session wouldn't be quite as improvisational as his last one.  He sipped his coffee and checked his watch.  She still had a few minutes before she was officially tardy.  He had faith.  Who would want to be late on their first day with a new trainer?

    Miles suddenly felt a vibration in his pocket.  Expecting a text, he reached his hand inside and pulled out an outdated IPhone that irritated him more often than not.  This was one of those 'more often' times, he figured, since his phone had vibrated to let him know it was dead. He sighed in frustration and pointed a figure at the charging port.

    The electricity that began building around his index finger was a light blue, like tiny lightning.  The light above him flickered tellingly as he drew the electricity from it and channeled it into himself.  The blue lightning surged into the charging port, bringing life back to his small cellular device.  In a few seconds, it was fully charged. 

    He had broken six phones perfecting that trick.

[Karalie Heise]

Mr. Jones had been her third trainer this year.  It wasn't as if she'd been a bad student or anything, not exactly, She just had bad luck.  The first one she didn't care for all that much and tended to avoid session like they were the plague.  The second one she never even met with, though admittedly she was part to blame for it, and by the time she was ready his workload seemed a bit full.  So here she was with the strict instruction to get her act together or she might never get to leave Pilot Ridge.  As it stood she was doomed to a year of college there, though admittedly that might not be the end of the world so long as she had Carter to keep her warm during the ridiculous winters Vermont had.

Karalie made her way to the office, dreading this more than anything else.  There was a reason she skipped training sessions.  She hated her ability, and given the option she would get rid of it all together.  She knew the more she practiced and used it the more control she would have and therefor would never have to use it again if she desired, but the process of learning that control was difficult.  It was physically and mentally trying, and when she had a million other things to worry about, like grades, extra curricular activities and most importantly her social life, she didn't have the time to be put out from headaches, nosebleeds, and severe depressions from someone else's jacked up memories. Trainers liked to see what she could do, then they probed for answers to questions she didn't care to reply to.  All in all it was tedious and annoying and she wished she could be anywhere but there. Dr. Neville would probably check in on her, though.  She remembered there conversation from just before Christmas all to well.

She arrived at the training room and took a deep breath, checking her phone one last time before knock on the door loudly and opening it to peek her head inside.  "Hello?" 

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    Miles was finishing off his coffee as his new student stuck her head inside. "Ah, yes! Karalie, yes? Come in, Come in." He stood and ushered her inside with a wave of his head. "Welcome to class. My name, as I'm sure you are aware, is Mr. Jones. Please, take a seat!" Miles picked her file off the floor, walked over to his desk in the corner, and set his cup and her information down. "Retrocognition, no?" He turned and crossed his arms.

    "I have been told you have very good control over your specialty," mused Miles, "most of the time." He tapped his chin. "My syllabus for our time together this year consists of changing that 'most of the time' to 'all of the time'. Sound good?" Miles did not wait for an answer. "Wonderful!"

    Walking back over to his seat, Miles forced a friendly smile. Their chairs were an appropriate distance apart-their knees a good foot or two away from each other. It was a comfortable space-at least Miles thought so. He figured she would speak up if she wasn't okay with the seating arrangement.

    Miles leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other.  "I would like to address your occasional depression, to start."  Miles knew he couldn't dive right in to the deep stuff-they had just met, after all, and he didn't want to force her into a stage she wasn't prepared for.  Still, he had no intention of babying her.  It was important to address this issue to gauge what she could handle as far as exercises.

    "I know it will be a touchy subject, but it is unavoidable."  He crossed his arms. 

    "How often do your more painful received memories resurface?"

[Karalie Heise]

Dread settled in her gut like a heavy rock as he ushered her in.  She smiled politely anyway and made her way into the training room and sank into one of the chairs, crossing her legs at the ankle as she slipped her shoulder bag to the ground.  Might as well get comfortable.  

She offered a nod as he verified what she was seeing him for, folding her hands into her lap as she watched him from her seat, swallowing the lump in her throat.  Whoever told him she had good control, especially most of the time, had been a damn liar, but she wasn't about to point that out.  She had better control than she once did, so she supposed on some level he wasn't entirely wrong.  

"Yes'uh." Her voice was soft, but his voice cut her off as she spoke her own words.  She pursed her lips slightly, already on edge with the professor simply because of the nature of their visit.  She'd been through this before.  They always had the best intentions, but in the end it was proper mental control she lacked.  She couldn't mentally harness the power properly, and only practice would fix that she reckoned.  

Karalie was shocked by the next sentence that left his mouth, and suddenly sat a little straighter.  Her depression? Her lips tightened further and her brows narrowed.  What did this have to do with her training? Was he referring to Luke? Was her breakup with the boy in her records or had Dr. Neville filled this putz in on things that weren't either of their business to know?  As he continued she felt herself relax just a hair.  She'd jumped to a conclusion rather than hear him out.  Either way, it was a strange way to begin a training session, and this simply didn't seem like any of his business.

"I dunno.." She started softly.  "If somethin' triggers it I guess." Her brows knit gently, not sure exactly what he was looking for.  "I get nightmares sometimes." She drawled, shifting slightly in her seat and uncrossing and then recrossing her ankles the other way.  "What's this got tuh do with anythin'?" He wasn't her therapist, after all.

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    Miles uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, and rubbed his face. "I need to know that you can handle your training. I need to know that you will not break down and go throw yourself off a roof somewhere after a session, yes? And it will go a lot faster if you just answer my questions. I'm not going to throw anything at you that you cannot handle. 

    "You get nightmares now, and you haven't even been to a session in..how long? Your file said you never even met your last trainer. What's going to happen now, that you'll be in here everyday-and you will be in here everyday. If you're struggling with handling it now, then that affects the way I have to train you."

    "And now we've wasted time here because I had to explain myself." Miles sighed. "I know you may not be used to trusting authority, especially in these recent years, I am not, uh, Bush, no?  There are worse things than answering some questions for me. Besides, it is immoral and probably illegal for me to take a single word you say out of this room."

    "I know we just met, but you can trust me." Miles crossed his arms and clenched his jaw. It bothered him that he had had to explain himself, but there was nothing that could be done about it now. He would have to deal with these curious youths.  A lecture or two wouldn't kill him, he supposed.

    "So, please, be honest with me. Your nightmares.  Are they intense? Are they common? You don't have to be specific about the content. How often do these memories come back to you?"

[Karalie Heise]

Her jaw went slack and she gaped at him.  He was blunt, and though she liked this quality in her father, she found she despised it on this man.  The absolute nerve of him! Did he have any tact? And to think he expected her to just blindly answer his stupid questions in his stupid accent like she was some stupid little robot! This simply would not do.  No, she would march herself down to Dr. Neville's office and insist upon someone new!

She knew it was a bad idea even as she thought it.  Neville would just tell her she had to see Jonesy here because she'd probably squandered away her chances with anyone else.  It wasn't like trainers grew on trees and she'd had three this year, though admittedly she never saw that second one.  Maybe she should have..

Her mouth shut and her lips grew into a thin line.  Brows knitted tight together as she glowered at the older man as he rubbed her offenses into her face as if she were some dog who had messed on the carpet.  Oh how the hatred grew in her belly, especially when he referenced Bush, as if that ma had anything to do with anything.  Personally, she thought he was a great leader.  Better than the idiot running the country now.  A man who thought it was alright to kill babies and drove the health system further into the ground.

Despite what he said, Karalie did not trust him.  Not even close, and the more he talked, the less she liked him.  She didn't want to answer a single one of his intrusive, stupid questions that she felt had nothing to do with anything, especially every day until the end of the semester.  "Every so often." She practically growled out.  "Look, I'm not about tuh go jump off uh roof or nothin'.  Just so ya'll know, I'm a good Christian girl an' don' intend tuh spend eternity with no one but Jesus, so don't you go insinuatin' that I'm depressed enough to go an' kill myself." As if she'd commit such a sin!  "An' I still don' know what this has tuh do with learning tuh control the retrocognition.  Ya'll want me tuh stop gettin' nightmares? Maybe you should teach me how tuh quit absorbin' memories in th'first place.  No memories, no nightmares." It seemed simple to her.

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    How American.

    Miles couldn't stand the way she talked or what she talked about. Did she really think she knew any better than him? That he didn't know the best way to handle her abilities? 

    "How do you expect me to help you control your powers if you do not cooperate?" He spoke in a monotone, his head moving ever so slightly, his every word oozing with condescension.  By now he knew that that was only going to piss her off more; but his goal wasn't to accommodate for each individual student's preferred method of teaching.  This would've been a lot nicer for her if she had just cooperated anyway.  Instead, she was forcing him to show her how he ran his class.  It was Miles's way or the high way, in his mind. 

    Besides, he knew better than her.

    Miles stood and walked over to his desk, leaving her in her seat.

    "I can appreciate your rebellious nature," Miles said as he picked up her file, "I was a child too, once."  He turned and tilted his head, opened her file, and flipped through the pages.

     "For someone so frustrated with my inability to teach you how to stop seeing these memories," Miles continued his high-horse monotone, "you have certainly shown an impressive lack of dedication. I am your third trainer, do you realize that? Does the reality of that hit you? I don't think it does. Imagine if someone needed three different math tutors in a single year.  Three English tutors.  Would that be normal?  Permissible?"  Miles shook his head slowly.  "This is not to say that you are stupid or incapable.  But you are...arrogant.  Stuck up.  You think, what, seeing some sadness or some pain from other people makes you above the rest of us?  Makes you smarter?  Wiser?  It does not."

    Miles laid down her file and walked back to his seat, in which he sat. 

    "I understand your frustration, though.  Surely controlling these incredible abilities that all of humanity has failed to wholly understand should be, you know, walk in the park?"  He pushed his sleeve up to his elbow.  "But you want to train.  You want to get to work, yes?"  He held out his arm.  "Get to work.  Take a waltz down my memory lane.  We will go from there.  We will use whatever memory on which you grasp to begin working on the suppression of said memory."

    "Unless you have another sort of objection?"

[Karalie Heise]

Her blood began to boil there below the surface.  After all that he was going to still continue to go on about her lack of cooperation?  It took everything she had to not get up and storm out.  She didn't want to deal with the windfall of a stunt like that, which was the only thing keeping her pretty rear end in the uncomfortable seat across from the Russian ogre.

A child! She supposed compared to him she was a child, but at eighteen she was technically an adult, at least in the eyes of the law.  She could vote, buy cigarette's, get into an NC17 movie (not that she would), among other things.  She was an adult.  All he was doing was insulting her with every word coming out of his vulgar little mouth.  The grip she had on her bag's strap tightened until her knuckles drained of color.  It was probably for the best she had a memory based power and not a physical one.

"Excuse me!?" She snapped when he reverted to name calling. It didn't stop there.  For all intents and purposes he was calling her lazy.  Did he not see the laundry list of activities she was involved in, or perhaps her grade point average through her entire time there at Hammel? What, did he think that good grades came from sitting around picking her nose all day?

"As uh matter've fact I do."  Dr. Neville be damned, she wasn't about to let this old turd insult her any more than he already had.  "I don' wanna know what's gone on in yer pathetic life, not when you've treated me with nothin' but disrespect since I walked into yer room.  I may be baby compared tuh you, but that don't mean I have tuh sit here an' listen tuh you talk down tuh me.  I'm arrogant? Really?"  She stood up.  She didn't need to take this!

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    "Sit down."   Was every kid at Hammel this weak? Every single student he had worked with so far had pitched a fit. He could remember enduring physical beatings, starvings, and much more brutal verbal abuse then what he had just put her through. How was it that they couldn't handle even the tiniest bit of criticism at the hands of someone much more knowledgeable?

    "You will sit and you will gleam some sort of memory from me, because we need something new to start this process off with. If we go with a memory that you already have, it may not give us an accurate picture of how hard it really is for you to let things go because it may have already worn off on you. Now I am running out of patience." Miles did not roll his sleeve back down, but instead he held his arm back out.

    "It is more than likely that you won't have to learn anything at all about my life. You will probably get a memory of me walking down the hall just before this class. If I'm lucky, you may get a memory of how incredibly infantile you are behaving and I may even get a workable student out of the exercise."

    "You will have respect from me when you earn it.  So far all you've done is work against me, work against yourself.  Swim with the tide, Ms. Heise, and stop trying so hard to fight it. We both know you're stuck with me.  I hate to tell you this, but my attitude and your disagreements about the way I word this or that are irrelevant.  I am not going to police every syllable that comes out of my mouth for your convenience.  You are just going to have to learn to deal with it, just as I will have to deal with your..well, your personality type." He held his arm a bit higher.

    "The water's warm, yes?"

[Karalie Heise]

Karalie did not sit.  She continued to glare at the man as he ordered her around, but she did at least stop from moving towards the door.  Truth was, she was intimidated by him and though she knew he couldn't physically stop her, he could do plenty of damage.  She was a senior after all, and being in her last year there were privileges she feared being revoked.  There were punishments that could fall into place that may affect her future or at least inconvenience her, and she didn't want that.

She didn't want his memories, either.

He didn't know how her power worked, and though she knew it was likely the memory obtained would be menial at best, it had the potential to be something big, something significant.  Who knew what she'd see? That was part of her problem; she had no say in the memories she came across.  As of now she could, at times, push them off, refuse their entry into her mind, but that was the best she could do and it wasn't even always.  

She was stuck with him.  They both knew it, and it was this power he had that allowed him to be so harsh and pushy with her.  They both knew this was it for her.  She had no other choices.  She hated him and she hated this predicament.  With a huff she plopped herself back into the chair, but folded her arms begrudgingly.  She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of giving in so easily, not when her pride was on the line or with him still talking down to her.  He was a condescending old prick, no denying that.

Someone should school him on analogies.  "I'll work with yah, but I ain't takin' none've yer memories." She told him firmly.  If it was going to be hers forever she should have some say in where it came from.  It wasn't like she could just push it out of her mind, it could resurface at any time because she had no control over when that happened.  Wouldn't be a big deal if it was menial as suspected, but if it wasn't...

[Miles Degrasse Jones]

    Miles felt an inner wave of satisfaction as she sat back down and consented to work with him, though he was very particular to keep his face from betraying him.

    Miles sighed and sat back in his chair. "I don't suppose I can force you to receive a memory for me, although you're making things a bit harder for the both of us."

    Miles propped his arm up on the arm of his chair and tilted his head in his hand. "Well then. You must let me consider how to...articulate what I am thinking." He spoke slowly, as if he was trying to find the right way to explain himself, which he was.

    "Obviously I've never had a recurring memory from someone else, but I have had some traumatic experiences in my life that required some handling." His other hand tapped its fingers on the chair as he basically thought out loud.

    "It requires more than simple suppression. It requires coping with what you see and learning to put it behind you. It can be very difficult, I am sure you know."

    He sat up and crossed his arms. 

    "As you said, I am not your therapist, but it's important that we find a coping mechanism for you before we start potentially giving you new memories during the training process." He frowned.  

    "It is clear that you don't want to find this coping mechanism with me, so perhaps you will accept my recommendation that you find an actual therapist? I'm sure the school has someone on staff to handle cases like yours.  It is imperative that you contact him or her immediately, yes?"

    "Unless you have something to add," he knew she loved throwing in her opinion every damn time he spoke, "I have an idea on how to begin."  He leaned forward and pulled a notepad and pen out of his jacket pocket.

[Karalie Heise]

She didn't both giving an answer.  Karalie didn't care if she was making his life more difficult or not.  That was on him.  He was the teacher and she was the student, and she didn't have to consent to anything she didn't want to.  No one could make her touch him.  No one could make her do anything.  Except stay there.  She would be cursed to the frozen wastelands of the north until she got herself under control, though she reminded herself it was only cold for half the year.  The half she was stuck there, really.  Not that she went home for summer.  Training went on year round, which meant her summer would be stuck with Comrade Stalin, here.

She wasn't sure where he got the idea that she was plagued with memories.  Yes, they came up unwanted, and yes, sometimes they affected her.  They had shaped who she had become, but the bright side was that often they would embed themselves in her mind and sort of accumulate and get lost.  The more traumatic ones stuck out, and sometimes she did have nightmares, but it didn't control who she was.  It didn't change her as much as some might think, so why was he pressing this issue with the therapist? Did he think she would hurt herself?

She could accept working with someone other than him, especially if it stalled the training with him. "Fine." She agreed quickly but had no intention to follow through.  At least not quickly.  She had the sneaking suspicion that he would keep up on her, and potentially find someone for her if she didn't act quickly enough, but she didn't need to cooperate.  Going to a head doctor didn't mean you had to cooperate with them.  


She had hoped once she agreed that she would be dismissed, but it seemed the commie had other plans.  There were plenty of things she wanted to say, but she suppressed them all since none would do any good with the situation and only stall him longer.  She didn't need to be here a moment longer than necessary.  "No, ya'll can just start."