February 22, 2014
Phony Calls

Phone Transcript #A0032-2376
Hi.

Hello. Did you know that the Minnesota Bank Association has earned you 5% extra on all of your banking?

I'm so sorry about your mother.

*Ahem* The Association can earn you an additional 3% with only one small change.

Your mother, Anne Regina Morrissey…

What about my mother?

There's been a terrible accident… a fire. It was… the water heater. The… new installation. Something went wrong with it. ...Gas leak.

What are you talking about?

Oh my God! I am so sorry! I thought you knew. Didn't they tell you yet? It was after the last time you talked to her… on Monday.

That was one of several calls brought to my attention in the last two weeks. They all involve telemarketers and one male individual pegged at somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old. The mother was unharmed, but did just get a new gas water heater installed. (I used her name since it's all over the news anyway.) The other calls involved similar information that the young man could not have known since none of the telemarketers could identify him, and no connection was made between them--two were in India, even.

I never had the nerve, or arrogance perhaps, to make a prank call as a teen. These were all about someone close to the telemarketer having died or been attacked. They also seemed to tap into some fear the telemarketer had about that person. By now you're probably wondering what I did about it--given what I revealed about how the Protectorate deals with unrepentant gifted.

I have no idea how many prank calls are made in the U.S. every day. Or how many are nasty. I don't know if anyone takes any, except the worst ones, seriously. The O.S.I.R. though, does take these seriously. That means I have to as well.

It didn't take the O.S.I.R. long to track the kid down despite covering his tracks with some phone tricks using Lookered. It didn't take Melvin long either. While the O.S.I.R. was getting their verification, Sarah, Susan D'Amico, and I met with the prankster in a nearby mall. Sarah and I needed a quick way in with the kid, and Susan was glad to help when we asked her to use her old Socialmabob page to set up a date with him. We didn't need her to go, but she insisted.

We got there early. In fact Susan came after we did. The meeting place was the busy food court at lunchtime. Susan sat a couple tables away toward the garbage bins. He came on time and spotted her from her pictures. We got up from our table and headed to the garbage with our trays before he reached the table. We didn't want to give him a chance to bolt. I forced his mouth shut without touching him. Sarah pulled a chair out for him and then sat down. I stood behind him with a hand gently on his shoulder, but pushing him into the seat. Susan did all of the talking.

She told him we knew about the calls, and that his life was in danger. He stopped struggling and I let go of him. I told him we knew he could tell we were telling the truth. There are a lot of cues for a telepath to pick up on. We couldn't know if he would believe it was true or just that we thought it was. Big difference sometimes. There was also the matter of would he actually care.

He didn't. He asked Susan if she knew how many people I'd killed. She paused only for a moment before telling the kid that it was a tiny number compared to the men, women, kids, and punks like him, that her uncle was responsible for. She also told him we could just as easily leave him to die. The men after him wouldn't hesitate.

Then he asked the question I didn't have an answer for. What about his mother? It would kill her if he just disappeared. He asked us to take her wherever he was going. There were just two problems. Melvin was on the mall security system and spotted agents heading toward the food court. He also had eyes on some more watching the mother's house. We got out of there. The kid is safe. Agents are still watching his mother and monitoring everything she does. Melvin arranged for him to call her in a safe manner. It's a bad situation. We plan to extract his mother this Wednesday and get them both somewhere safe. It's just too bad the kid has ruined both of their lives.

Tags: abduction, cell phone, Lookered, Melvin Klein, O.S.I.R., pranks, Sarah Jayne, Socialmabob, Susan D'Amico, telemarketers, telepathy, truth.

February 15, 2014
A Walk Outside

Do you know the stories? People lay down and concentrate. They see a portal open and they go up out of their bodies and into a world of puffy clouds and light beams, and maybe even castles or whole other worlds? That's not a thing. Not as far as anyone I've talked to knows. Those events are called astral projection. Here's the catch though. Projection is real. Just not the white fluffy clouds and other worlds.

Some of the gifted can take their consciousnesses, their minds and thoughts and emotions, and move them outside of their bodies. They can look back at their bodies lying on the couch or bed. Their bodies still breath. They are still alive. No one is home though. They can't be awoken. They can't be reached by empathy or telepathy. They just lay motionless and loose, relaxed.

Meanwhile their minds are free to roam, unencumbered of everything, except one of the other staples from the fluffy other world stories, a silver cord. That cord comes out of the middle of their chest on their physical bodies and attaches to somewhere behind them where they are away from their body. Here's where truth is apparently stranger than fiction. Astral projectors do not have ghostly bodies invisible to prime people. They don't have bodies at all. No phantom hands or legs or torsos. They exist simply as a presence, without form. Yet they can see, and smell, and hear--they can't touch anything without another gift. Yet this silver cord follows them around and they can see it loop around to somewhere behind them. It never pulls tight and stops them. It never catches on anything. It never tangles on itself or anything else. Lastly, these gifted can, and need, to follow the cord back to their bodies to get back to normal consciousness.

Now, I've told you all this so that I can tell you there are also astral constructions. They're like non-living presences. So like astral travellers--astral projectors away from their bodies--they are like a glow in a dark room to someone who is sensitive to them. Or it's like you have your eyes closed and you know someone has just come up to stand beside you, and you can feel them without directly touching them.

The importance of these constructions is that they can be deconstructed. I've been educated about this because any entity that is free roaming must be one of these constructs. This is of course important because of Domine as detailed in Watching for Emptiness. Yes that means we have an ability available to us to deal with this threat.

Tags: astral projection, Domine, empathy (psychic), entities, psychokinesis, telepathy.

February 8, 2014
Live on the Run

Hi my name is Jenny Brumal.

I am part of Josh's team. We catch the bad guys. I am here to tell you to live on the run. I mean that being on the run doesn't mean that you can't live. It's different than when you have no one after you. That doesn't make it any less a life. It also doesn't mean that you can't enjoy some of it. You may think that the problems you had before being chased didn't mean anything. They did. Not everything can be a matter of life and death. Not everything that isn't has to mean less.

With gifts like mine and like Sarah Jayne's you learn that feelings are feelings no matter why you have them. I read things. I pick up a locket and I know that a girl put her hand on it after the boy who gave it to her put it on her. I know that she was giddy. She was blushing. He was very handsome. She liked him a lot. It doesn't matter those were her feelings. I felt them. They're mine too. I don't even know what he looked like.

People may want to kill you. They may fear you. They may tell you to go away that you belong with the other devils. That's no reason to believe them. Sit and watch the sunset. Go out on a date. Sleep in on a Saturday. Find a safe place to eat something different. You should still live. You must. Not to spite the haters. Not because I said to. You must because you deserve it. Running isn't who you are. Running is just what you have to do. If you are lucky then you're not so much as running as you are hiding, and that is lucky. You don't have to live more life because you're in one place. You can do it on the move too. It just doesn't take as much effort when you are still. It takes the same thing running or hiding. You just need hope. All you need for hope is to know it is there. I'm telling you it is. You have my blessing. Hope.

Tags: emotion, empathy (psychic), hate, hope, Jenny Brumal, Joshua Rhoads, living, psychometry, pursuit, Sarah Jayne.

February 1, 2014
The Skies Have Ears

The storm last week took our power for about 75 hours. I don't know what it was about it that took so long. Otherwise, I wasn't sure just how much of a blizzard it was. It wasn't a ton of snow as far as I'm concerned. Maybe living in an apartment building you don't get that sense of the wind trying to tear your home apart, or the groan of snow piling up on your roof. So, I decided not to post days late and waited until now.

I've been thinking about surveillance again. I went back through old posts to see if I mentioned anything about surveillance drones used by the government. I made only one tiny offhand mention last summer. Drones have been in the news a lot more lately. I don't think we have to be worried about the armed drones around here just yet. Until now I've been unconcerned about drones spying on me. Satellites have watched over cities for decades now. Current ones can read your newspaper if you hold it right. However things are changing.

For one the drones are getting smaller. That allows them to get into places that the satellites have little or no access to. The other is that unlike satellites drones listen. You might think that the sound of their own engine makes them useless for listening devices, however that isn't true. They have directional microphones that barely hear the drone itself behind the microphone. They have laser systems that can pick up the vibrations in glass from people speaking in a room and translate that for hearing. This makes for spy devices that don't have to be planted beforehand and can be on the move with a moment's notice. They are also passive, meaning that they can't be traced, or even noticed given the distance the drone can be away from you.

I also wanted to mention to be careful out on the street. You know they have stoplight cameras watching for speeders and crossing on the red. Did you also know that they have microphones in other locations to listen for gunshots? Yes, there is a network of them to help law enforcement get to the scene or shootings quicker, or find the ones without witnesses that aren't the shooter. The police might not be using those speakers to listen in on people on the street--they rely on software to tell them a shot was fired (they can even tell the difference of a car backfiring)--but I can tell you the O.S.I.R. can do it and does it.

Tags: drones, O.S.I.R., police, surveillance.