Halapatov

Chapter Two

"I'm sure it'll be okay." Sophie assured me as we got changed in my room. Days had passed and we were in preparation for my brother's arrival that night.

I shook my head. "You don't know him, Soph. He's always hated me, and his girlfriend looks right down her nose at me."

"But why?" she asked, confused. "You never said."

"I don't know." I scowled, head down as I tied up my pants' belt. "He seems to think I'm annoying. I mean, sometimes when he invited friends over, when I was little, I'd blurt out things I'd noticed about them or him, embarrassing things, but I was just a kid! My powers had only just developed and I couldn't help it!"

Sophie looked even more confused. "But I thought paladanians were able to understand anything, so surely he-"

"No." I interrupted, suddenly feeling bad about the one failure of paladanian understanding. "There's one problem; the Personal Flaw. It was discovered by our scientists long ago. If an occurrence has anything to do with a relationship you are in, it's like you have blinkered vision. Emotions get in the way, make people irrational."

"Oh!" Sophie looked like she'd just had a mind-blowing realization. "Is that why your leaders are so cold and detached?"

"Um," I bit my lip, still thinking of my own troubles. "In part. It just makes friendships between paladanians with different levels of understanding hard, because if one of them does something the other doesn't like, neither of them will think rationally. And when a paladanian thinks someone else is wrong, they will not back down. So, with my brother, he had friends, who he naturally wanted to impress, because that's how our world works, I suppose, and I came in, being a little know-it-all and made him look bad. His friends were all iffy about it and because he cared about their company he always took their side, meaning he holds an endless grudge against me."

"That's stupid." Sophie stated. I nodded.

"Ah well, I guess I'll just have to deal with it, won't I?" I sighed, flopping down on my bed. "I just hope he doesn't increase his vendetta to include you."

Soon we were ready and it was evening. Sophie and I sat anxiously in the front room, trying to hide our nervous anticipation by engrossing ourselves in different activities. Sophie opened her report on her digi-file but it was obvious to everyone that she was getting nowhere with it; she was being too quiet. I on the other hand was reading a book, and although I kept turning pages I was gaining no knowledge from it. It was a book on medicine, a topic I'd been focusing on lately as I'd decided that I wanted to train to be a healer, so I could help people. Therefore I should have been properly reading it, so that I could absorb the information internally, but I was honestly so worried about a visit from my brother that I could barely even look at one word without becoming instantly distracted.

There was a very good reason I feared my brother's return. You see, all through my childhood I'd had good, solid friendships with all sorts of kids in my town and more, but when I turned seven my powers developed. They allowed me a deep understanding of emotions, events and concepts far advanced of any of my peers, and had side effects such as telekinesis and fantastically acute senses. One important thing to know about paladanians is their thirst for intelligence. While other races develop more bodily desires, as my people hit adolescence they yearn for knowledge and fulfillment. They want to know everything and learning gives them pride. Everybody knows that jealousy occurs when one person sees another person as better than them, and that jealousy is poisonous and causes dissent. So as my ability to understand and take in information from all things around me increased, my popularity lessened. I had a terrible habit of just telling people details I'd noticed on the spot, without thinking through the effects of my words, and this made people resent me. Nobody, however, resented me more than my dear brother Robert. I suppose having a younger sister with a higher intellect than you must be damaging on reputation and self-confidence, and it just hit him hard. Because of the personal flaw, the one thing that I never understood was how much my ramblings hurt my brother, and I didn't realize that I was doing any harm until he started taking his anger out on me, by spreading rumours, insulting me, ignoring me, vetoing every idea I ever had and encouraging others to stay away from me. The only real person that stood with me through it all was Leila. I tried so hard to be loving to my brother at all times, but by now I was terrified of him, and that is a terrible, horrendous thing for siblings to have between them; fear.