Have You Heard? | Glowfic Constellation

Rescue

She's new in town, fresh off the train, and so very, very ready to get away from people. A quick stop inside the train station to sit and listen gives her a detailed map of the surrounding area - everything within a few miles - and lets her pick out a few potential hiding places. It's a simple use of her power, listening to all the tiny little sounds and letting them tell her what's going on around her, where things are, where she is.

She picks a spot - a disused bit of a storm sewer, bone dry according to the acoustics - and starts making her way there, effortlessly finding a route that lets her avoid being seen or heard. It's pretty far from the train station, and she munches on a granola bar as she goes; she's got a few days of food in her pack, enough to last until she's worked out which stores are safe for dumpster diving. For now, she's not going to worry about it; she just wants to get herself hidden away so she can finally relax.

Getting into the sewer is easy; there's a padlock, but her superpowered hearing makes it trivial to pick. Then it's just a matter of following the map to get where she's going... until suddenly, with a flash of light, it isn't.

She can't hear.

She can hear. She can hear everything. Ever since she got her power, sounds she wasn't paying attention to would... slide back. Tuck away. Politely wait their turn. Vision was still a cacophony, sometimes, smell and taste and touch still threatened pain and overwhelm even on the best of days, but sound, sound had been her friend, only to betray her. She hears everything, everything in her new, tiny, unaugmented range, whether she wants to or not.

She doesn't know where she is. She doesn't know what happened. She's barely aware of her body - she's fallen over, it takes her a few moments to put together. There are people, she can hear them. Whatever happened, she's found, she's found, they're going to send her back...

She curls up into a tight ball, operating solely on instinct, and screams and screams and screams.

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And after a while - something strange does in fact happen to her senses!

Rescue

Well.

It doesn't hurt, so that's good. She sits down and tries to make sense of it - it's definitely not her power back again, but it's... something. She heads back upstairs and peers out the window and tries to work out how what she's seeing relates to what she's hearing.

Her range is nothing like it was before, but still improved; she can clearly hear things about a mile away. What she's hearing makes less sense, though; her old power filtered out everything but what she was interested in, and this seems not to; she doesn't even have an idea of what many of the sounds are.

They did it, she writes. It's okay.

Oh, good.

Rescue

Yeah. Thank you.

Do you know when they're planning on doing the portal?

Before the Year's out, but probably not immediately.

Rescue

Okay.

If they can do electricity, I have a tablet with some things on it that might be useful, but the battery's dead.

What's that?

Rescue

It's a kind of small computer. It has some things on it from the internet - maps and books and things. But it needs power from the battery to work. I can find someplace to recharge it once the portal is made, but if we can get it charged before that it'll help.

I'll ask.

Rescue

She takes the battery out of the tablet and leaves it on the table, in case that helps.

I have a text to speech app, too, so you can learn to speak English. If you want.

I'd like that.

Rescue

Okay. If they can figure out how to recharge it I'll show you.

I don't

It doesn't look like they can figure that out.

Rescue

Okay. I can charge it once we have the portal, anyway.

She spends a couple more days getting a feel for the neighborhood - what her neighbors are like, when it's busy, when it's quiet, what kinds of things happen when, and then during one of the quiet times she heads out for a walk, just nearby.

It's a pretty quiet neighborhood! And exceptionally pretty, if she's calm enough to appreciate that.

Rescue

She's listening to it much more than looking at it, and doesn't really notice - the singing and wind chimes and things are pretty, but she can hear those just as well from her house, now.

Nothing happens. It's not just that nothing happens were she can see it - nothing happens at all.

She goes back in after ten minutes, but a few days later she's out again.

Nothing happens this time either. People go peaceably about their lives.

Rescue

She doesn't go much farther, this trip, but over the next few weeks she extends her range, little by little.

It's really weird, letting people see me and not having anything bad happen, she writes one day.

Nothing bad's going to happen here. Really. It's safe.

Rescue

The next note contains a particularly intricate geometric doodle, and then underneath, I've never had that before. I don't know what to do with it.

I know the feeling.

Rescue

Yeah.

What did you do?

Spent a long time waiting for things to go wrong again. They didn't, so I just - kept going. Let myself assume that the next day wouldn't be the day that changed.

Rescue

New York was better, but it still wasn't safe. I know what to do with being free, a little bit. I don't know what to do with not having to worry about how I'm going to stay that way.