Jason's stunned silence had melted into attentive silence when Rue and hine started to exchange words. He too had immediately been worried that the woman's presence meant bad news but was immediately relieved when Shine instead asked to block Rue's visions. It was yes partially because he liked the thought of not having to worry about rue suddenly getting overtaken by visions, but also because he knew shine's personality type. if there was urgent business then she's be getting to it urgently. The fact that she was opening discussions by offering rue a flavor meant this would be a more casual visit. Something rue then seemed to completely miss when she refused Shine's help.
Jason hadn't really realized it for most of his life but, after spending a week on the outside and going shopping around normal people for what felt like the first time in his life, Jason knew he was different. Not just in the way that he had psychic powers and a fucked up backstory involving a terrible secret organization and forgotten past, that stuff was kind of obvious. But living in Brewster makes you get used to a completely different reality. In Brew everything was a competition, not just who had the highest rank, or highest merit score, those were just the foundations of the system. Everything was class division, from how well you walked to how many friends you had to if you could customize the scents of your bowel gases (the kids from red school just got weird some times). It was normal for everyone to always be on edge, always be on the lookout, either for prey, or for predators. It was just a way of like to always be watching for someone about to stick a knife in your back, or better for a back turned so you can stick a few knives yourself.
People on the outside were different. Their eyes weren't sharp and careful, they were dull and happy. People from brew got exhausted, people on the outside got sleepy. In brew you failed, on the outside you had learning experiences. Jason was not a normal person. He had thought he was a normal person, but that was just from being surrounded by other people like him ever since he could form coherent memories. He knew he could never have pretended to be one Either. He now understood how incredibly lucky he'd been that Shine thought of Jacob, made him learn it, gave him a disguise to hide the child of Brew he was; because the melancholic boy now realized that under Shine's tutelage he hadn't just adapted to that environment, he'd learned to thrive in it.
You wouldn't think it remembering the quiet wallflower he was in the institution, but that status is what had kept him safe. He was quiet and meek enough to not be a threat, but studious, diligent, organized, and anti-social enough not to be seen as an easy target. A weirdo, a loner, but not weak. Jason had always seen himself as weak of course, but he knew that Shine had taught him to not let anyone see it. He was great at just blending into the background, and when he learned how to do that, she had then taught him how to take advantage of that. How to be incredibly aware of everything going on around you when no one is noticing your presence. He'd learned to gather data of all sorts on people when they weren't paying attention, and Jack was the one who spun those threads of information into a tapestry of leadership and charisma. It was only now that he was out of Brewster that he realized how strange that made him, and he was woefully reminded of it when he noticed that Rue wasn't as good at it as he was despite being from the same place.
Jason didn't look at her strangely when she rejected initially. He understood why she didn't connect the dots right away, most people weren't trained to like he was, and he expertly hid the discomfort he felt suddenly realizing even Rue didn't understand his experience completely. He took a small composing breath, hardly noticeable as he inhaled through his nostrils, and opened his mouth to explain things to her, but was a second too late as the cat man's voice echoed through the air in its unnatural tone.
"Wow, she really hasn't figured it out yet, has she? What, is this girl only clever when it comes to fairy tales?" commented Chess, seemingly genuinely surprised that Rue didn't pick up on what he knew for a fact the other 3 people in this room were aware of.
"Don't be crass Chess." commented Shine calmly though with an underlying hardness that made it clear it wasn't a request.
"No, seriously, this girl picks up on my connection to that damn Cheshire pussy in a second-"
"Oh! That's it!" exclaimed Jason immediately, to the subsequent expectant silence of the room. "ah-erh, uhm sorry, Chess, he reminded me of a character but i couldn't figure out who till he just said it... the... che..shir...." Jason then became small and quiet as Chess gave him a crazy(
er) glare.
"How to punish a mouse so incompetent, that it would dare interrupt me? Perhaps I would grab an armament, and stab it in the fucking kidney!?" asked the insulted mutant, dropping his tempo halfway into the last stanza in favour of just barking out the last words.
Jason gulped lightly, feeling a chill go down his back. "Don't interrupt the Cheshire cat when he's talking, got it."
"heh."
Jason's eyes immediately darted to Shine who'd made the barely audible chuckle before placing down the tea cup she'd been holding. "Shouldn't have called him that," commented the woman without bothering to look directly at him, knowing she'd have caught Jason's attention anyways.
The white haired youth immediately looked back at the mutant who was now making nothing short of a dozen knives float in mid-air around him, each blade pointed at Jason, his face (basically looked like
this) a a macabre portrait of rage mixed with disgust.
"What the fuck did you just say to me you little shit?"
Jason couldn't think of anything to say, and was pretty sure that anything he tried to say would just end up coming out broken and terrified, so he opted to say nothing at all. This proved to be wise.
Chess sighed out somewhat and made the knives disappear, keeping his eyes locked on Jason the whole time.
"Everybody gets one. Next time you call me that you find a pine cone in your ovaries, got it?"
Jason nodded quickly, and then got a confused look, and then opened his mouth to state the obvious.
"He'll make it work anyways." commented shine before he could get a word out.
"Man, you two really like doing that." he said blankly, more or less getting used to constantly being cut off before saying anything.
"Maybe we'd do it less if it wasn't so obvious what you were going to say, ever think of that? God damn Shiny, how'd you manage to find kids who are noth stupid and smart at the same time?"
The woman only chuckled lightly. "I believe that's what is refere to as the pot calling the kettle black."
"Tch, speak for yourself, I only let people think I'm an idiot because it's fun to mess with them. What's their excuse?"
"Are you going to stop stalling and finally clue in miss Rue to what started this whole tangent? I know you had a rhyme prepared and everything."
"Fuck you, you don't know me! You're not my real mom! I'll be in my trailer! Oh wait: I don't have one, do I?!" and with that clearly over the top display chess popped away in a vacuum of air.
Jason sighed out deeply. "Well, while he's off being an idiot, let me explain." shine permitted it by not objecting as Jason turned to his partner in crime. "I understand why it is you don;t trust these people, trust me I could sit here reciting you every law and theory on psychology and behaviorology that explain how i understand your reaction, but you;re not thinking clearly Rue. Didn't it seem weird to you that Shine said she was once part of Brewster like us? Didn't it seem odd that someoen who escaped like we did would have so many resources? Of course it did, so you didn't trust her, especially when you picked up on the fact that she was hiding things from us, even when she semed to have a good reason for it. But then we can't assume she's lying because that would create more questions than it would answer. how doe she know about brew? if shes with teh admins why didn't we get captured again? Is this just more of their plans? what possible resons could there be for that? Is there anything we can do about it? That line of questioning leads to a dead end, we don't have nearly enough information to make a reasonable hypothesis and all options are left as plausible as the others. So we have to assume she's saying the truth. If she was part of brew before us, and she is a telepath, and she said she studied psychci for many years, and she has access to all this technology, but she isn't allies with them, what is she? There's only one possible answer that fits every criteria," Jason looked over to Shine to confirm if his train of thought was correct before finishing his thought. "You're a rogue S-rank, aren't you?"
Shine's smile was almost warm.
"I'm glad to see you haven't been neglecting your thought exercises."
"The key isn't to think better, but to think differently." replied Jason with a knowing smile, aware she would understand the meaning behind the words. He then turned back to rue and continued his explanation, since he doubted that rue would understand the full importance of this revelation right away. "Basically her being an S-rank means that no matter what you did right now, there is not a single thing you could to to stop this woman from rearranging your whole personality if she wanted to. A-rankers may have been terrifying back in Brew, but S-rankers are important enough that the administrators don't even let them be around other psychics like us. Until now I wasn't even sure they existed. The difference between her and us is about ten times the difference between us and normal humans. The fact that you're even capable of feeling doubt towards her right now means that she is stopping herself from just going into your mind and programming you to trust her to save time."
"In fact I put up some mental barriers to stop your visions from coming while Chess had you distracted." added the woman soicaly before finishing off her cup. when she looked back up she saw Jason glaring disapprovingly in her direction and smiled. "I'll take them out if you ask me too of course. I Just knew you'd probably need proof before believing that someone could play with your mind without you noticing it. Like Jason said, S-rankers like me are essentially psychic monsters. even the administrators drop all pretenses with us. We were told very explicitly that any instance of us using out powers without authorization beforehand would result in our immediate termination. Exploding collars were a favourite method of theirs to enforce that notion, but not the only one." She retold everything mostly casualy, but her gze diddrop down lightly once she'd gotten to the collars bit. One can only imagine what she may have seen the administrators do to any S-ranker not showing the utmost loyalty and compliance in the past.
