SYMMETRY ➽ D. HALE [1]

22 ; freak files

22 ➽ FREAK FILES [UNEDITED]

Elise waited anxiously as Deaton shuffled through a pile of loose papers. She'd opted to skip her class and see Deaton, as he'd left her a message that he'd found something about her abilities. "You see, most supernatural abilities are genetic," he explained, pulling a handful of papers from the stack and laying them out on the desk before Elise. "Of course, with the exception of lycanthropy and other mutations."

Elise nodded, leaning forward to look at the papers. Each held various diagrams and scrawled labels that Elise had trouble discerning. One page had sketches of various plants, while another had diagrams of what Elise presumed to be a poorly drawn human brain. The words scrawled onto the page were oddly spaced, leaving random emptiness between letters in the same word while at times leaving no space between two different words.

"Where did you get these?" she asked, lifting her eyes to look at the man.

He shrugged, pushing the papers aside. "I'm a collector of sorts." She nodded in affirmation before returning her eyes to the parchment. "It's clear that these things you've been experiencing are all connected in some way. If they weren't, they wouldn't all be happening to you. So far, the only connection I've been able to find has been that every single experience you've mentioned- even down to the headaches- can all be traced back to different kinds of clairvoyance."

Elise raised a brow as Deaton paused. "Can we pretend that I'm not an expert at this kind of thing? What's clairvoyance?"

Deaton nodded. "My bad, Elise. A clairvoyant can pick up on things that other people can't. For example, you said that you could feel Lydia's presence in the woods?"

Elise shrugged. "I don't know. I got really cold all of a sudden, and then I felt disoriented and kind of scared. There was, like, this tugging in my head and I followed that."

The man nodded again, though Elise could see his frustration with neither of them really knowing what was going on. She doubted her description of how she'd felt in the woods was necessarily helpful. "Exactly. That's not something a normal person's senses could pick up." Elise nodded, waiting for him to continue. "Also, you said you had headaches, correct?"

"I wouldn't call them headaches," Elise shrugged. "It's more like an elephant's trying to balance on my skull." Elise's headaches had become nearly unbearable in recent days and she was still uncertain of the cause.

Deaton nodded sympathetically. "That might also be part of whatever it is you're experiencing."

Elise waited for a moment, expecting him to continue. However, Deaton sat back on the other side of the desk, a look of uncertainty in his eyes. "Is that all that you found?"

"Sadly, yes."

Elise frowned, leaning back in her chair and studying the papers in front of her. She held the diagram of the brain up, examining it for anything that would make sense to her, but most of the words on the page felt like gibberish to her. "Well, at least it's something."

"Like I said before, the majority of the time, these things are genetic," Deaton said. "You'll have to do some of your own research. Do you know of anyone in your family who has had similar... episodes?"

"I mean, if there were, they'd probably be locked up in Eichen House," Elise chuckled, earning a frown from Deaton. Her laughter stopped and her lips formed a thin line. "We have some boxes in the attic with a bunch of family stuff, maybe there's something in there."

He nodded and bid her goodbye as she lifted herself from the seat and made her way out of the animal clinic.

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