Overlap

Chapter 28-B: Telepathy's Weakness

<11/02/2010 - 09:05 | Saffrin Middle School (Math), Austell, GA, USA>

As soon as I got to math class, I was softly ambushed by one annoying person alone. "Come on Reed. Stop being a loner and just with us today."

This again? I cleared my throat, ensuring I could be as firm and honest with Banarus as possible. "I can't today. I have something to take care of in class this time, so I'm going to have to be by myself for the day." I knew she would not really understand, but I wasn't technically lying to her either. Something Lumina told me earlier was still weighing so heavily on my mind that I could think of nor imagine anything else. Whether or not she felt like giving up, I brushed by her chest since she was in my way, and I finally got over to an isolated desk at the center of the room, securing my more private position.

"You and your things." Banarus grumbled as she flew by the front of my desk, heading back to her clustered seating arrangement by Malica and Maddison.

"What is with her anyway?"

"Who, Banarus?" I knew what Lumina was talking about, but I wasn't expecting her to bring it up so soon, which is why I sounded a little confused in the first place. With a distracted mind, I tried to shorten it for her. "She's always doing that. She has this strange need to make sure I'm not left out of most of the things they do over there. It used to be helpful when I was more girly and hung out over there often. But now, she's been bothering me for the past two months about sitting there again and again. It's getting old."

"Have you considered that she might actually want to be friends with you despite the incident with Malica? You could learn a thing or two from her you know."

I was disappointed to hear that coming from her mouth, but it bothered me the least with what we had left to discuss. "Let's get back on topic with this heat issue you mentioned."

"Oh..." Lumina made such a sad whimper in her own voice, one of regret and defeat, but all I could do was wait to find out why. "Do you remember what I said about psionic waves being disrupted by the heat?"

"Not really," I answered. "I think I got lost in the sea of information I drowned in yesterday."

"Basically, if the outdoor temperature for either one of us gets close to or above sixty degrees Nixus—"

I had to cut her off immediately. "I don't read Nixus."

She corrected herself in an aggressive tone, annoyed by my own interjection. "—Sixty-five Fahrenheit or higher, our connection will automatically fail, and trying to make contact again with that temperature range will be impossible, until it drops to an appropriate level."

Now I do faintly remember her saying something about heat being capable of killing the connection. I didn't realize that it only took warming up outside to make telepathy totally useless. I also knew that while it applies to both of us, Lumina is basically not one to worry about, since she would never be caught alive in such a heated area, for her own sake. In a nut shell, I can't contact her the way I did today if it gets hot outside, nor can I keep an existing connection going. Right now, it's cold out, and will be all week long due to the weather we have in the month of November. "What if I were to stand in a freezer or something?"

"It doesn't work like that," she warned. "The Cora sector of the brain is extremely sensitive to heat, so much that it is affected by all surrounding heat from one mile away in all directions. So it has to be outdoor temperatures. Indoor temperature would not negatively affect the connection, unless the difference indoors was severe enough."

"Okay..." I wanted to be sure that I had all the facts together. She seemed to be hung up on this one detail, when her previous issue was not being friends with me. Somewhere, there were dots I could not connect right away. "So if it warms out outside where I'm at, anywhere within a mile of where I'm at here in Georgia, then we can't connect or communicate at all?"