Connie suddenly looked frightened. Keira’s voice held a hint of menace.
“The truth?”
“Can you handle the truth?” Keira asked, rather melodramatically.
“I don’t know,” Connie replied, suddenly feeling less sure that she actually wanted to know.
“That’s honest. Look, this is heavy shit I’m going to tell you. This is real X file stuff, so you either walk away now and that’s it, you just forget everything you’ve seen, or you swear to keep silent and I’ll allow you to know the truth.”
“If I don’t?”
“Don’t what? Keep silent?”
Connie nodded, looking increasingly alarmed.
“I said I have powers, so you’ll suddenly find you won’t remember jack shit, but you won’t know it, because you won’t even know you ever knew it.”
Connie was confused and frightened.
“I need a pee!” she declared.
“Well, truth or mind-wipe?”
“Truth; but can it wait until I’ve had a pee?”
Keira nodded her head towards the bathroom. On entering, Connie immediately saw the window was too small for her to fit through. Instead, she sat and relieved herself.
Part of her was frightened, as she didn’t understand, but a greater part of her was curious, and a little in awe of this strange girl whom she discovered she didn’t know at all.
Keira was enjoying herself. She had no idea where she was going with this, but if the fat girl blabbed, then it would all be proved to be a vivid imagination.
On a whim, she focussed on the PC monitor on his desk in the corner. Then she imagined picking it up through mental power alone. To her delight and surprise, the monitor rose a few inches off the desk, stopping only because the cable reached its limit. She carefully lowered it again.
“Cool!” she said to the empty room.
Connie returned looking less worried.
“Better?” Keira asked.
The other girl nodded.
“Come and sit down.”
It was a very different Connie who walked home about an hour later. Usually, she was a bubbly person, often without good reason. She was one of the world’s optimists. She would be the girl who was given a box of horse poo for Christmas, and believe she had been given a pony, but it was hidden by her parents first, just for her to have fun looking for it.
She walked into the kitchen silently and simply sat down at the table.
Her mother was slightly startled, as normally Connie entered like a mini tornado and never silently.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
“No.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Was school okay?”
“What’s with all the questions?” Connie asked testily, standing up and heading to her room.
Her mother heard her door slam. Now she was really worried.
Aston, Connie’s younger brother, grinned and shouted, “Connie’s on the rag!”
Without really thinking, his mother slapped the back of his head.
“Don’t you ever say such a thing again, that is cruel and heartless!” she said, knowing it was also untrue, as Connie wasn’t due for another ten days.
Connie lay on her bed staring at the ceiling.
“Aliens do exist, and I’ve met one!” she told herself. Then she thought about everything she saw the alien do.
“I’m not born of Earth,” Keira had told the gullible Connie, dramatically. “At least, I was actually born on Earth, but I was conceived many light years away. My people are not like you, but through a highly sophisticated seeding programme, we were able to use the womb of a human female who thought she was infertile and by pairing human DNA with our own, I was planted in her womb and permitted to grow with the appearance of being human.”
“S.s.so what do your people look like?”
“Different. We have not possessed organic or corporeal bodies for many millennia.”
That flummoxed Connie.
“You what?”
“We don’t have physical form. My people are pure energy and spiritual beings.”
“Um, if you were born here, how do you know all this?”
“I was ignorant of my origins until quite recently. Through telepathy, my people contacted me and informed me of my origins, my powers and my purpose here among you humans.”
“What’s that?” Connie had asked.
“To serve and protect a weaker and vulnerable species!” Keira had said, barely able to keep a straight face.
“You mean like a superhero?”
“They are just comics, whereas I am real. I have to finish my Earth Education before undertaking my true calling, but I may have to get some experience first, with lesser activities of justice.”
“But why do you have the ability to change sex?”
“Camouflage,” Keira invented on the spot. “You’ve seen superman, and isn’t that pair of specs and a floppy fringe a lousy disguise? If you have a superhero who is growing up and has yet to master whatever powers that exist, and she’s obviously female, then when you try to find her, you won’t look at any males, will you?”
“Gosh, how clever!”
“You see, up until this point, all my powers were latent, so I just didn’t know I had them. But now I’ve had the call, so to speak; I’m beginning to learn how to master them. It’s a vulnerable time – a time in the old days that lots of people used to be burned as witches, so we learned to hide.”
“You mean you’re not the only one?” Connie asked.
“There’s another safety feature. If there are we won’t know until we’re fully developed and can seek out any others. You see, if we banded together, then we’d be even more vulnerable, and could give the others away unwittingly.”
“That makes sense.”
“I’m almost ready to come out of hiding now, so it’ll soon be time for me to be a girl all the time.”
“How will you cope with school and stuff?”
“I’m not sure; it might be tricky.”
“What about your parents; won’t they be shocked and angry?”
“Probably,” said Keira with a naughty grin. “Now, do you want to see what I can do?”
Connie had just gaped as she watched Keira use only her mental power to lift objects like the next door neighbours’ Jaguar six feet in the air and then lower in again.
“Now you know why I am not exactly encouraging people to get too close to me. You have wanted to be close, so I trust you. If you ever betray me, you will never know what hit you!”
Connie had left at that point, walking home as fast as her legs could carry her.
Meanwhile, the ‘alien’ was having fun discovering just what she really could do.
She had no idea how she managed to do these things, but she did connect it to the torc. She knew she could fly, well, sort of. It was more an exaggerated jump, as if someone switched off the gravity. She could move things by her mind, and possibly throw bolts of energy. So far she’d made a real mess of the fish tank. It had taken ages to clear up, fortunately none had died. Two rolls of kitchen paper and the hairdryer had managed to dry the carpet, which was just as well, as she discovered she couldn’t dry things with her breath.
As an experiment, she took off the torc, and discovered that without it, Kenneth was powerless. It was a no brainer, so the torc went back on without delay.
She hoped that the story she wove for Connie would have the desired effect. Actually, it was quite useful having a ‘normal’ as a sort of side kick, as there would be things she needed that Kenneth would be unable to acquire, but Connie would be able to purchase without drawing attention to herself.
At present, she planned to become Keira whenever she could, at least once a day. She grinned as she looked forward to leaving school and home. Then she could be Keira all the time!
However, the joy was short-lived. She had to have a strategy to ensure that she could make a seamless transition from Kenneth to Keira without too much hassle. That was a real problem, and one she would have to think carefully about.