Power Swap: I'm Holding Out For a Hero (Sean)

[Zebadiah Hayes]

this thread takes place on Monday, September 14th

It had been a long hard week.

Last Monday Zeb had woken up feeling strangely refreshed and well rested. Though he hadn't felt he really needed it, he had made a fresh pot of coffee for the morning, but had only just started sipping his first mug when the pounding on his door happened.

It seemed that several of the students were having trouble with their powers. Not just trouble really. It seemed that some had completely lost their abilities, while others had woken up with completely different ones. And everyone was freaking out.

Zeb had been so busy helping the students, that it had taken him til that night for him to realize that his own ability was different. He had been sitting in his living room when he realized that the coffee he had made in the morning was still half full. Not only that, but he could tell something was crawling on the wall outside. It was a little weird. A little freaky. And at first he thought it was a hallucination. He had gone outside and made sure. There was a spider crawling on the wall. It was real. It was there.

And then it dawned on him that he hadn't seen anything...unusual the whole day. He had been so busy with the upset students that he hadn't realized.

Now, a week later, Zeb was still doing his best to help out the others. And he'd found that with his new found ability to sleep well through the night. He had more energy during the day. And he didn't have to deal with other...side effects. True, the spider thing was weird, but it wasn't anything compared to what he usually dealt with.

So Zeb had went into super-hero mode. He spent a lot of time consoling students or cleaning up accidents with new found powers.

He had planned to stop by Dr. Neville's office that morning to catch the man up on how the weekend had been. There were several student who were having a very difficult time and Zeb wanted to make sure that the older man would be able to talk to them. Zeb could do his very best, but he wasn't licensed.

He paused to knock on the other man's door and call out. "Dr. Neville?"

[Dr. Sean Neville]

It had been a long week.

A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

Sean had woken to one of his worst nightmares. His worst would be waking up to find that Josh had died in his sleep and thankfully, that hadn’t happened. The psychiatrist didn’t have the current emotional fortitude to handle such a situation, and he could barely even think about it idly without his chest aching. Beyond that and the death of his nephew Ryan, his worst nightmare had come to pass.

Which was worse, in a way, because his worst nightmare had heretofore been impossible. It had been an idle fear, one that didn’t seize him with panic in the middle of the night because, much like waking up to find that his hands and feet had switched places, it defied the laws of physics and the universe. It couldn’t happen, and so it wasn’t worth worrying about.

However, it had happened somehow, and the former telepath couldn’t explain it.

Former telepath, because he had woken last week to find that he no longer possessed his telepathy.

He still had mental shields, which was a start. He hadn’t tested for his memory manipulation, because the first day he had lacked the presence of mind to care about that. His telepathy comprised such a core part of him – of his life, of his identity, of his ability to process information and to interact with other people – that nothing else mattered.

That first day had been difficult, so difficult as to be paralyzing. Fortunately, it had occurred during the long weekend for Labor Day, and thus he hadn’t had to balance work and his crisis. He had notified Hammel, because of how important it was, but that had been incidental.

Until it hadn’t been. Somehow, this horrifying situation had affected more people than Sean. That had been a mixed blessing. At least he could attribute it to some sort of event, although one that defied everything known about meta-human powers. But that did nothing to end his suffering, and it involved other people suffering as well.

During the past week, he had pulled himself together enough to come to Hammel and take on his duties, but he felt near breaking point in a way that made him inwardly feel useless.

The knock at the door startled him from his reverie, doubly so when he realized that he couldn’t simply know who was outside his door. Due to his limitations, there was only one way to find out. “Come in!” He called back, his voice somewhat hoarse.

[Zebadiah Hayes]

Even after all these years, Zeb still found himself feeling like a child when he walked into Dr. Neville's office. As a student he had dropped in to see the good doctor on several occasions. And though Dr. Neville had always had some advice, or at least listened with compassion to his problems and offer comfort, Zeb couldn't help but feel a bit nervous as he walked in either. It was a child-ish fear. And one that always faded as soon as he started talking, but for those first few steps as he walked in, Zeb couldn't help but feel a little anxious.

"Dr. Neville. How are you today, sir?" Zeb said, taking a seat across from the older man. Zeb wasn't blind. He knew that some of the staff had a harder time dealing with the recent power troubles. Most of them weren't dealing with it as well as he was. Still he was sure that the former telepath would be just fine. After all, he was the one who always had the answers. Not to mention his age gave him plenty of wisdom and experience. Of course Zeb also didn't realize that some people were more closely intertwined, and dependent even, on their abilities.

"I just wanted to stop by and fill you in on how the weekend went. I'm sure you can assume how hard things have been for several of the students since this...whatever it is happened. Has anyone been in to talk to you? I've tried to make sure everyone knows that we're all here for them," Zeb continued. He still couldn't believe how easy keeping everything straight was when he'd had multiple good nights of sleep.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean drew on every well of inner strength he still possessed so that he could fake his way through this conversation. It wasn’t that he disliked Zeb; in fact, he had always been fond of the younger man, dating back to when the dorm monitor had been a student, and the psychiatrist had been a decade younger, although still at this same position, in this same office, seated at this same desk.

But in full possession of his powers.

That was the crux of the issue.

He felt miserable because he didn’t have his powers, and that misery brought him to the brink of depression.

In fact, it had pushed him over the edge of depression that first day, and he had been pulling himself back from that ever since.

So he faked a smile. And that smile looked as fake as one might expect. “Hello, Zeb.” He paused briefly, before replying, “I’m hanging in.” Which was as much as he could say about the situation.

“How are you holding up?” His misery dulled his ability to focus, but he still cared, and he knew that this situation had affected more than just him.

Then, at the suggestion, he nodded along. “I’d appreciate an update.” Since he had no way of independently verifying such events through his powers, he needed to rely on self-reporting.