Simurgh scream influence 6

The lights came back on, bright, with a fluorescent whine that became a scream, one sound in a chorus. Human screams came from upstairs, and my eyes strained to adjust and see what might be causing the screaming. Was it someone on our side? Someone hurt? Someone who’d snapped and become hostile?

The Simurgh wasn’t necessarily flipping people to ‘red’ with a new, unprecedented speed. This was part of any fight against the Endbringer. In a given population, there were bound to be people who were on the edge, vulnerable, needing only the right prompt. As she kept screaming, she kept gathering data, and she used that data to find better prompts for more people who were on a ledge, on the cusp of losing their minds.

The very second my vision was clear and focused enough to see the details in the bright white hallway, half the lights went out again.

The danger we were facing, the hazards of this particular battlefield, were those people who had been on the cusp of breaking down and who were now putty in the Simurgh’s hands.

[...]

The forcefield grabbed the woman by the waist, still holding her arms. I lifted her. She shrank to tiny size, and I shifted my grip, still holding her. She grew again, and I didn’t lose my grip.

Her screaming became a kind of screaming-sobbing.

Who was she, and how had she been this close to the edge, that she was this badly off now?

[...]

There was someone in costume sitting on the stairs in the dark, hands over his ears, rocking a little. I landed next to him while I waited for others, checking him over, but he barely seemed to recognize I was there. The hallways- I checked both, and both were lit. There was one dead body in the hallway, either a ‘red’ by Defiant’s system or a victim of a red, but no apparent threats.

I used my aura, reaching out for calm and relief and pushing it out there.

In a way, I was glad that I could. The process of connecting to the Fragile One and her origins, realizing she wasn’t the enemy and letting her connect to me… it had opened doors both for the shaping of my forcefield and for my emotion control. It felt right that the emotion control was letting me help and soothe, now.

The cape stopped rocking and looked up at me.

- Last 20.4