Sensing Thinnies + Infrasound

People were putting on a brave face for their friends, but I could see that a lot of the teenagers here were just as worried as the adults. Why, though?

I mean, I'd seen some anxiety in Arcadia, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it was here. People smiled, but they moved just a little too fast. Their steps were just a little too long and their spines were just a little too stiff.

It was a strange aura of uneasiness that made me uneasy too, and Carpenter was picking up on it too.

“There's something wrong.”

My mind was racing.

I'd read something about this, somewhere. Oh, right.

“It's low frequency sounds,” I said. “Some people think it's why some people experience ghost phenomena. It can create feelings of fear, blurred vision and feelings of dizziness.”

Just below the frequency of human hearing, infrasounds had been discovered by an engineer in 1980. He'd discovered it accidentally in a lab that had been considered eerie by his colleagues. He'd studied other supposedly haunted sites as well. It didn't apply everywhere, but it was certainly one theory. Odd electromagnetic fields also caused similar issues, and those had been found in supposedly haunted castles.

“Or it could be a parahuman effect, but they're typically less subtle than this.”

“I've been here before, and it was never like this,” Carpenter said. Her eyes were twitching, and for a moment it almost looked as though her face blurred for a second. I rubbed my eyes. “Whatever this is, it's new.”

“Well, maybe their air conditioning system has come off it's mooring, but otherwise, it's possibly either a parahuman thing or maybe an open portal with something weird on the other side,” I said. It wasn't as though a storm was brewing outside, or there was an earthquake happening. We weren't zoned for that.

***

There'd been a fog producer at the battle with the Empire, but I'd read the file that had been hastily assembled based on his activities in Germany. He'd never been able to generate enough fog to cover the entire mall; if he was here, though, that meant that his partner was here too.

“They aren't kidding,” I said in a low voice.

“There are thinnies here,” I heard Ruth say. She sounded worried. “I normally just see them, but I can feel them too now.”

I could feel them too; I just hadn't noticed it because I'd mixed it with the underlying dread from the infrasound.

“Earthquakes cause infrasound, right?” I said. “And that can agitate animals. If the thinnies are strong enough to feel, then that means that they're either big or they're numerous. Either way, people need to get out.”

***

Fun